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Why is computer science a sausage fest?

stubbornella.org

111–120 of 155 posts

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#111
I wonder why it is that people are so hesitant to simply accept the fact that men and women are fundamentally different. Is it so offensive to say that most women choose not to enter CS programs because females have different interests than males?

I think we all see this in our daily lives. I haven't conducted any scientific studies, but few women I know are interested in the internal functioning of things as compared to men.

If a female did show interest in learning how computers work, and somebody told her that she's not going to be as good as a male, then there would be something to complain about.

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#112
If there was ever a field where the current, male dominated, population wanted women in it, it's CS. I've never met a male CS person that wasn't genuinely happy to have a woman in the room doing CS as well.

I think the issues of men in CS relate more to it being a uniquely problem solving discipline, not prone to the kind of social interactions women want it to be. (I know I'm at risk of stereotyping here, but I think the concept is valid).

I've met some really fine women Computer Scientists, and I never saw or heard from them that they'd ever been materially discriminated against for being female. Anecdotal I'm sure, here's another. My group of college friends all formed out of people in the CS program at my school. We were pretty evenly split along male/female lines. Now, many years later, of our group, none of the women have stayed in pure CS (or some branch like InfoSec), opting to go work in different fields, like requirements management, or managing personnel doing CS type work. When asked why they left? All of them say that the relentless focus on pure problem solving eventually just wore them down and that they craved more human interaction. Sitting in cubes all day hacking out code just wasn't what they wanted to do with their life.

Now, this kind of experience may not be true everywhere, I'm sure there are places where there is rampant sexism. But if a woman wants to do CS, she's more than welcome to do it, and based on my experience, barriers to her presence in the field will not be because of sexism. Similarly, you see lots of thinking about "why so few women in CS?" but you don't see any for construction/garbage handling/music composition/long-haul truck driving/.

I think if you really want to understand the CS question, you have to understand the others. For some of the fields, it's pretty easy to chalk it up to the physical side of the job. But why so few women in music composition? There are absurdly few women in any kind of music composition. I don't mean "song writing" as in lyrics -- there's tons of women crooners. I mean putting notes on a page, or spinning and beat matching discs, or whatever. The demands of the profession are really no different than CS, yet I think representation is very similar.

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#113
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have with that logic is, why wouldn't men decide the same thing? The author's reasoning seems to be 1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group 2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?" but I ask, why? The article seems to be rejecting the idea that men are naturally better than women at programming (and…

For one thing, achieving high status might not be so relevant for a woman. A womb is inherently valuable, whereas men have to prove by status that they can take care of a child. Or rather, in theory one high status male can make babies with a lot of low status women. It may not quite work that way anymore in todays society (? I am not high status enough to know), but it might still be genetically driving our behavior…

> It may not quite work that way anymore in todays society

Whether or not this is true today is irrelevant; what matters is whether it was true in the environment of evolutionary adaptation.

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#114
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To which I shall counter, but you should have. This is an attitude of entitlement." Clay Shirky has written about this at length [1]; the basic point being that women are socialized their whole lives to not be entitled or aggressive but to stay quiet and in the background, while men are constantly socialized to take what they want, step forward, go for it, "be a man" etc. Obviously there is much variation, and yes,…

The passivity thing really puzzles me. Why would I want something and not go for it?

I think this might be an argument for grants for women :)

Also, not everyone is a go-getter extrovert.

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#115
post #58
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am interested in a lot of things. But it would be a trivial exercise for me to name something you're not interested in.

Well, only relatively. I think the test is "given immortality, would you get bored?" After exhausting all the stuff I like, I'd learn to like more stuff.

I think becoming interested in more stuff would be a necessity for anyone with immortality. Otherwise you'd be miserable.

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#116
post #102

Why is logging a sausage fest? Why is construction a sausage fest? Why is fishing a sausage fest? Why is trucking a sausage fest? Why is computer science treated as though gender balance is important when there are plenty of fields where women are nearly non-existent.

All the other professions are high-risk and require significant physical strength. Men are generally more comfortable with high-risk, high-reward jobs, and have a physical strength advantage over women. Computer Science is not high-risk and does not require significant physical strength.

So why choose computer science as an area to push for more women to participate in?

It seems like the opposite of equality.

"Here are a bunch of dangerous, yet lucrative career tracks, but I think more women should be programmers because it's safer than climbing a ladder."

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#117
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While totally conceding the part about younger players being more likely to be spurred into comp sci by video games I do contest the hardcore games as a gateway drug theory. I think the thing that pulls kids in is the creativity of the games and the effect that the game has on them. So a fun casual game in my opinion would have the same pulling power as the latest version of crysis. fwiw this is subjective and I dont…

> I think the thing that pulls kids in is the creativity of the games and the effect that the game has on them. This is absolutely what pulls kids into games. What pulls kids into knowledge about computers is the realization that better hardware means they can play "better" games. This means they wind up with a pretty good conceptual map of computers at an early age. That gives them a huge advantage at programming ov…

>That gives them a huge advantage at programming over someone who just sees computers as a black box.

Nowadays most videogames are played in consoles, which are effectively black boxes (except for some very experienced hackers).

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#118

On someone's complaint about Google setting up a special grant program for women, OP writes: This stinks of jealousy. Why not be happy for the female students? Why rain on someone else’s parade? Something good happening to someone else seems to disgust fringley. Frankly, it comes off as childish. That's a terrible argument. Can't you say that about any form of discrimination? "So what if all the nice houses and neigh…

Then she lists a lot of code-cowboy vs. good-developer differences, involving things like "working in teams" and "understanding human elements" and "respecting people" (which are implicitly feminine traits, according to the OP, unlike the focused solitude that "code-cowboys" employ.) This is triply problematic--she dismisses out of hand the idea that men are better than women at abstract reasoning and such, but implicitly argues that the qualities of "good developers" are feminine and the qualities of "code cowboys" are both bad for development and masculine.

I think that there is something ironic about someone using sexist reasoning to justify anti-sexist policies. While I may agree that it is probably difficult being a woman working in an industry dominated so strongly by men, she's not helping her case by pulling the same kind of crap of which she accuses men.

Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#119
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, a better analogy would be African-Americans getting extra scholarships, to compensate for the relative lack of wealth their families accumulated. I certainly wouldn't begrudge this. Whatever cognitive differences there are between the sexes, I think they're very minor. Do they keep people like Shakespeare from being considered great writers, though women are said to have stronger verbal ability? Anyone read…

"Actually, a better analogy would be African-Americans getting extra scholarships, to compensate for the relative lack of wealth their families accumulated. I certainly wouldn't begrudge this." While I most certainly agree I've always wondered why they don't give the scholarships based on economic rather than racial conditions. Quite frankly, with the way that the US is right now, this would end up mostly benefiting…

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Re: Why is computer science a sausage fest?

#120
post #96
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> men are naturally better than women at programming (and some other ideas) and embracing the idea that women are naturally better than men at finding a suitable career. If it's plausible enough that millions of young women can have their career and life choices distorted away from STEM by a little sexism (a distortion in the dozens or scores of percents), then why isn't it even more plausible that millions of young…

It's not that they're not equally plausible ; it's that they're not equally solvable . We can "fix" sexism (and thus cause the "right" number of women to go into STEM); we can't "fix" Autism-linked chromosomes in people who have already been born.

Does reality care whether something you have a problem with is solvable?
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