211–220 of 305 posts
There are however, women in computer science.
This is part of the problem, women are not children, girls are and society sadly enforces this.
Think of how strange a title would be if someone talked about "being a boy in computer science".
I think these sorts of articles are asking the wrong question when they ask "why aren't there more women in CS?" or "how can we get more women in CS?" Instead the question should be (IMHO) "are there any barriers to entry for women in CS?" I suspect the opinion people have on this issue largely mirrors their view on affirmative action. Some believe in a meritocracy that is blind to race, age and gender. They believe…
> Personally I believe that gender imbalance in this (and other) professions is only indirectly related to gender. History disagrees with you. In the 1960s, programming was considered to be "women's work", like typing, filing and other clerical duties, while men did the engineering bit of actually building the machines. But people began to realize that software was difficult and important, so they decided women had t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are ignoring initial conditions. I understand rayiner's comment as: 1. high male/female ratio + blind meritocracy => self-sustaining male culture 2. affirmative action as a temporary kludge to shift male/female ratio 3. lower male/female ratio + blind meritocracy => self-sustaining new equilibrium That is after affirmative action stops; it is not necessary that the system returns to old high male/female state.
> 1. high male/female ratio + blind meritocracy => self-sustaining male culture Based on what, the assumption that women are self-selecting against wanting to be programmers due to it being a male dominated profession? In that case, the action should be taken to promote CS education and inclusion at the preparatory level. Creating a bias away from the meritocracy at the hiring stage is still discriminatory and result…
Yes, but again, that is meant a only a temporary solution; as something that will correct the abnormal situation we have now and then will go away.
"You're basically telling multiple generations of men that it's okay for them to be discriminated against for their entire life due to something that their fathers or grandfathers did"
Isn't that ok? Every single time I think about this issue I feel guilty as hell just for being male. Every time I see a cultural norm that discriminates women I feel a bit responsible for it - and these bits accumulate quickly. I'm ready to be discriminated against to some extent if it's going to help; it's not because I want someone to make effort in my place but because I know that my effort alone is not sufficient.
Also, multiple generations is not that long a time. Twenty, maybe thirty years and it would be over - society evolves quite fast nowadays, we don't need to wait for centuries - like women had to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Holding "women for CS" events only makes the women in CS feel even more isolated from their male peers I don't think this is true at all (and usually you never see women say this, just males rationalizing their position). Women centric CS events are to encourage those who have an interest but may have been hesitant for some reason to seek it out. Or to encourage those who are students to seek help and find comraderi…
>The difference is that girls have an immediate re-enforcing explanation for that sense of being out of place: you don't belong because you're a woman How is this different from guys who go, "They're so ahead of me. I'm out of place, because they are all smarter than me"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what if "woman in CS" programs can help to get woman with intellect and passion into CS?
People who work in CS are known to work with scientific methods. "What if" is simply not enough. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. We, that is people who work in the field of computer science, need to demand more than guesses and beliefs when dealing with "solutions" to gender inequality. If someone has an ideas…
That's hilarious. Try to remember this next time you put a print statement in the code or adjust some constant until it's right.
The problem here is that we have no way of either experimenting meaningfully or testing most of the things we'd like to know. We can describe tiny parts of reality and assume that some correlation is in fact causation, but without actually doing something it's impossible to conclusively prove what effect will any one action have.
That's nothing new - and it's not that unseen in programming, either. I think that "waiting for a proof" in this case is just an excuse; we need to get the best approximations, of course, but in the end we just need to find the courage to go and implement a solution without a certainty that it will be the best or even good.
In other words, when your service is on fire because thousands of users want to access it simultaneously (good for you) the first thing to do is to bring it back by any means necessary, including tools like intuition and wild guesses, and formalize the process afterwards.
I think these sorts of articles are asking the wrong question when they ask "why aren't there more women in CS?" or "how can we get more women in CS?" Instead the question should be (IMHO) "are there any barriers to entry for women in CS?" I suspect the opinion people have on this issue largely mirrors their view on affirmative action. Some believe in a meritocracy that is blind to race, age and gender. They believe…
> For me, I'm not sure how productive all this gender hand-wringing really is. Demographic dramatically over-represented in government, corporate boards, startup founders, growth industries, etc unconcerned about status quo. And there's the problem.
And there's the problem.
Why? Apparently what we are dealing with is not simple. And, I can assure you with no doubt at all, if we try solutions that are wrong, then we can do some harm. We should keep in mind the rule, "First, do no harm.".
Why not simple? Boys and girls, men and women, via nature and/or nurture "deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same" (E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving'). My experience is that he was correct and made if anything an understatement. I fervently urge nearly everyone to keep in front of their mind the point "not the same" and add to that that we don't know nearly enough to be clear on the differences or even if they are due to nature, nurture, socialization, discrimination, stereotypes, ingrained traditions, or what. We just do not know.
For a short, interim answer, may I suggest that we work hard to ensure the same opportunities but not to count on the same outcomes.
Did I mention, boys and girls, men and women, are different and we don't how different or the causes. We just don't know. Moreover, finding the causes and being clear on the differences takes us into fields of social science. Gotta tell you, those fields are super tough places to do solid science. There's no Newton's second law, Newton's law of gravity, conservation of energy, Maxwell's equations, E = mc^2, quantum mechanics, standard model, etc. There's nothing like engineering, etc. Some bright people have worked hard in social science, and we are still waiting for Newton like results.
Did I mention, "First do no harm"? Maybe I should also mention, "It's not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.".
Now, don't let any young girls read this because it might cause them to give up trying to be a small version of Daddy and send them back to trying to be a small version of Mommy and sugar and spice and everything nice good at eliciting protective emotions from Daddy with fantastic verbal and social skills, with unbelievable ability to perceive and manipulate the emotions of others.
I will flip this over: How many of you male nerds believe it was just socialization or tradition that kept you from being as good as the little goody goody girls in the fourth grade at spelling, languages, clerical accuracy in arithmetic, neatness in your handwriting, playground gymnastics, reading comprehension, especially of fiction, drawing and painting, rote memorization, social skills in groups, understanding what the teacher wanted and pleasing the teacher, etc.?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should watch Disney movies with your kid and discuss them. Ignorance won't stop anything.
Why call out Disney for such special treatment. Should he do similar with the Rambo series? Not watching Disney movies seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the content of Disney movies. There is no shortage of other things to watch.
I'm all for good role models. But bad models are useful to, so the kid knows it's bad behavior, especially when they are likely to run into that culture anyway (as is the case with role models). All the kid will see is that you won't allow them to see what the rest of America has. Any moral message will be secondary. So you might as well ensure that they learn the lessons correctly the first time.
And no, they don't need to see Rambo, but Rambo isn't likely to be relevant to their lives if we're discussing Disney movies. I strongly believe things like Disney are crucial for kids.
-I'm barely recovering from a childhood of only PBS allowed and I feel entirely disconnected from my generation whenever we talk about culture before 2003. All I remember is from watching The News Hour about Bill Clinton having sex and bombing places and reading about nsync on the back of juice boxes. Don't do that, it's not healthy.