Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 154 posts

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#111

Post by ZeroGravitas »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #92
codeisawesome wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have you seen Media outlets talking about Programmers are "geeks" or "nerds"? I recall The Register calling scientists "boffins" but not using the other two words for Coders. I have absolutely no problem with "Coder". At the risk of sounding grand and dandy, I think people realize the impact Code has on their lives, and being called a coder makes me very happy. I agree with your apprehension over Geek & Nerd, t…

Being called a "coder" implies you're performing mechanistic grunt work of manipulating symbols with little thought to architecture, or really without any implied discipline. It's akin to identifying a writer or journalist as a "typist". Though I suppose that's what many "coders" do, go figure. The media by and large does not care about programmers, only insofar as there is overlap with Internet entrepreneurs.

"It's akin to identifying a writer or journalist as a "typist"."

Or it's like referring to a writer as a "writer".

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#112

Post by r0naa »

discodave wrote: post #108
hendry wrote: post #76

I don't quite understand if "Majoring" means completed degrees or not. In my old University, women were common in the first year of Comp Sci, as it was the easiest department to gain entry to for them as females because of quotas or whatever positive discrimination is called. However in the second year, they would typically transfer out to another department they were more keen on, but probably wouldn't have won a pl…

Do you actually have any evidence of it being easier for women to get into CS because of quotas?

Isn't quota and affirmative action the very definition of making it easier for a certain group to get access to a particular institution?

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#113

Post by this2shallPass »

joshkpeterson wrote: post #106
this2shallPass wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely hostility. If a prevailing doctrine is straight white wealthy males are the problem, isn't it hostile to people who are straight, white, wealthy, or male?

You don't get it. Please reflect on this more.

I get it :)

I suggest you reflect on this and what people say and mean when they talk about topics relating to privilege, power, gender, race, wealth, patriarchy, etc., and you'll get it, too.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#114

Post by compostor42 »

baldajan wrote: post #13

Really glad to see these trends, not only at Stanford, but other universities. Diversity in any field makes it richer.

Does anybody else find it creepy when people say things like "diversity in any field makes it richer","diversity is our strength", etc... with a straight face? Very Orwellian.

Honestly, who talks like this in real life besides some HR drone? Its like you have these canned, cliche lines programmed into your brain or something.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#115

Post by fsloth »

douche wrote: post #56
ngoel36 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Very little of a CS degree is "coding" - CS is so much more than that. It's even beyond "engineering". A proper CS degree teaches you how to think , how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities. What separates CS from other degrees is that it does filter out those without the horsepower or fortitude on both the quant side (algorithms)…

University CS programs are kinda shitty for teaching people how to actually write code. It's not really more than that, it's math and theory and proofs instead of that . University faculty, if they ever worked in a professional environment, did it years and years ago before they got tenure. The worst course I took in my CS department was the algorithms and data structures course. Didn't write a line of code. Wrote a…

Yes, I agree theory without attending to implications in hardware in the real world is not very practical.

I do wonder to what student material you've been exposed to when you claim most CS majors could not attend a basic practical programming course in C.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#116

Post by hobs »

greglindahl wrote: post #110
java000 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're famous and respected as businessmen and philanthropists, not software engineers. The media and general public are largely ignorant of the technical accomplishments of those men and would pay them little notice had they not been so phenomenally successful in business. Compare the responses to the deaths of Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie.

I've never seen Woz celebrated as a businessman or philanthropist. He's a geek's geek, a nerd's nerd, an amazing engineer, etc.

However, I would argue that if he wasn't a foil to jobs he wouldnt be nearly as interesting, there are plenty of equally/more deserving engineering geniuses in the world, no matter how gifted woz is.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#117

Post by zasz »

ivanca wrote: post #73

What's with the obsession of gender equality by women in high paying jobs?, is never about lack of women in sewer maintenance or coal mining, or bugs exterminators, or firemen (firewoman? Is that even a word?). Is always CEOs or STEAM jobs at silicon valley. That's a very narrow and convenient definition of "equality" isn't it?

Believe it or not, women have had to fight for the right to work in coal mines. You probably hear only about the fight to get more women in tech, since you are in tech. But anyway, here you go: http://www.women-in-mining.com/news/1389309

Proof that there used to be laws on the books banning women from working in mines, and feminists went and fought them. It's quite possible that the other reason you don't hear about female coal miners asking for more representation is that tech is worse at hiring women than coal mines are by now.

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#118

Post by fsloth »

sridca wrote: post #68
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession. But you're talking about the non-professional setting. Well, that started with the home computer revolution. There were few teenage girls programming at home because…

> Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession. I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession. Just…

The history of practical computing is really labour intensive. The mass of the work has been done in counting paychecks of megacorps, census, taxes, and weather simulations. Unfortunately I have no statistics that would say that women did most of the jobs there but based on historical precedence it sounds plausible to me.

Programming as a field has historically two or three subcultures - the corporate, the academic (and finally, the personal).

The academic branch is where the new stuff has been imagined. The corporate branch is where the work that added value to society in form of financial income happened. Think of huge accounting machines, and extrapolate from that to modern computing. Taxes, census etc.

The corporate branch had several tasks that were labour intensive. Usually this labour intensive part was reserved for women (they are more keen on details on average or other such rationalization). Also, historically, women did not get paid as much as men so more labour for the same amount of money...

Well, anyway, the first computers were women (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer).

Women were also extensively hired as data entry clerks.

In the age of the mainframe, a typical division of labour was that the software designer wrote the program on paper with pencil, and then the data entry clerk encoded it into the computer (using punch cards or later terminals).

The integrated software designer / data entry thing probably originated in the universities and other research setings (i.e. Knuth typing his Tex from his notebook the the terminal at his Uni. and so on).

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#119

Post by j-l- »

randyrand wrote: post #102

As a foreigner, can someone explain me why this is important?

As a foreigner, I guess it is similar to importance of a labor in previous socialism. Maybe there is some "The Part played by CS majoring females in the Transition from Ape to Man" on the way. Who knows :)

Re: Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University

#120

Post by richmarr »

r0naa wrote: post #112
discodave wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually have any evidence of it being easier for women to get into CS because of quotas?

Isn't quota and affirmative action the very definition of making it easier for a certain group to get access to a particular institution?

I think discodave is asking for evidence that quotas are in use for these courses, as oppposed to evidence that quotas increase numbers of otherwise-underrepresented groups
Post reply on HN