141–150 of 155 posts
If I found CS boring, I doubt I'd stick around either, regardless of what the opportunities looked like.
CS education works best for people who already know how to code before they begin. CS teaches the theory behind a practice in which they assume you already have some skill. Women are less likely to already know, because they don’t play video games as much. This does not make any sense. How does playing video games translate to coding skill?
One anecdote that I heard from people involved with the CMU admissions criteria for CS. In addition to GPA, leadership skills, etc. they used to also look for something interesting technical that you'd done prior to college. They have now removed that criteria from the selection process because they found that it did not correlate with success upon coming to CMU, but it did correlate with gender.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One anecdote that I heard from people involved with the CMU admissions criteria for CS. In addition to GPA, leadership skills, etc. they used to also look for something interesting technical that you'd done prior to college. They have now removed that criteria from the selection process because they found that it did not correlate with success upon coming to CMU, but it did correlate with gender.
You are completely wrong. I am very good friends with one of the Deans of SCS at CMU and have heard first hand from him that the reason CMU has more women in CS than the avg university is because they DON'T do this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are completely wrong. I am very good friends with one of the Deans of SCS at CMU and have heard first hand from him that the reason CMU has more women in CS than the avg university is because they DON'T do this.
That's exactly what I said. They used to do this. Now they don't.
All professionals wants to be treated with respect and not be typecast, whether there is a population of 5 or 500,000 for their particular subgroup.
Community members going on about how women are less capable etc. makes for at least a partially self fulfilling prophesy. If a community member is badmouthing my particular subgroup, I am gong to assume they are prejudiced against me. Only the women who really, really love technology will go into a field in which they expect to be significantly discriminated against.
Some, but not all, of women are capable and some, but not all, of men are capable. Perhaps the numbers of capable men exceed the numbers of women. Even so that doesn't mean women as a whole are incapable of excelling with CS. All professionals wants to be treated with respect and not be typecast, whether there is a population of 5 or 500,000 for their particular subgroup. Community members going on about how women ar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think becoming interested in more stuff would be a necessity for anyone with immortality. Otherwise you'd be miserable.
Right; but the people who are interested in One Thing or Nothing just say "I don't think I'd want to be immortal; it would get too boring."
Obviously anyone making any comment about this article is wandering into a minefield of appearing sexist. While I agree with the sentiment (attracting girls into CS is OK, putting some money at the end of a stick is OK, and CS will benefit from them being there), one of the points did bother me. The first time I spoke at a conference, John Allsopp contacted me to ask if I would do it. I never would have submitted a p…
"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,…
Many women - and lots of men, too - do this thing where they attempt to control the world by being gentle, sweet and pathetic (in the sense of evoking emotions). By trying to be appealing so things come to them.
It's a nicer way of control, but it is still about control. It's emotionally dishonest.
And when it doesn't work, they go boo-hoo. So do the men who do the same thing.
Whenever you see a "nice guy" who refuses to ask the object of his affections out, and instead plays friend and hopes she'll wake up one day, that's this behavior at work.
I don't think women are socialized to be this way any more than men are -- but men are better at ignoring socialization and doing extreme things (both good and bad) in the pursuit of their goals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
but it seems to have virtually no data on women in computing at all, Are you asserting that we need to experimentally verify discrimination in every single new context one can think of? Usually, we generalize from other research: there is no reason to suppose CS is miraculously free of discrimination against women, considering the variety of areas in which this kind of discrimination has been shown exist. I don't see…
Usually, we generalize from other research: there is no reason to suppose CS is miraculously free of discrimination against women, considering the variety of areas in which this kind of discrimination has been shown exist. There is also no reason to assume that all or most of the gender gap is caused by discrimination. If we generalize, we discover that lots of other fields (e.g., medicine, law) have sexism, but they…
If we generalize, we discover that lots of other fields (e.g., medicine, law)
have sexism, but they also have 50% women
Remember, we are asking what makes CS special.
[..] and you'll see the same conclusion applies to workers.
[1] http://pdfs.journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/2002/12000/Gen...
(BTW, I did an experiment here: I upvoted your comment some time ago. I have a feeling that in a discussion of 'score 1' comments, bumping one of them to '2' precipitates upvoting of the '2' and downvoting of the others)