Calling All Chix0rz
April 17th, 2007
Seems the number of women entering CS is dwindling.
“The nerd factor is huge,” Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.
And what of it? It’s true.
Here’s the real problem:
The Advanced Placement high school course in computer science may be part of the problem, according to Dr. Cuny. “The AP computer course is a disaster,” she said. “It teaches Java programming, which is very appealing to a lot of people, but not to others. It doesn’t teach what you can do with computers.”
Quite the understatement. With them teaching Java, I’m surprised anyone continues on to pursue Comp Sci.
More seriously, there’s a disturbing comment at the end of the article:
Others worry that the field cannot grow to its potential if it lacks women’s perspective. “Does it matter that women’s outlook is missing? I think it does,” Dr. Cuny said. “Technology is pervasive in society, and its impact is only going to increase. Shouldn’t everyone have a voice in shaping the technology?”
First, regarding that last statement: No. Not everyone should have a voice in shaping technology. People who actually know something should have a voice. Membership in one or another sex is not a useful criteria.
Second, if you’re going to talk about “women’s perspective” and “women’s outlook”, then don’t be surprised when people tell you that men and women think differently and use that to justify exclusion. It’s a tricky thing to claim that some group is different, but only different in ways that brings value, and not different in some way that’s a liability, especially if you’re suggesting that mere difference is in itself a value.
7 Responses to “Calling All Chix0rz”
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April 17th, 2007 at 08:56 PM
“Quite the understatement. With them teaching Java, I’m surprised anyone continues on to pursue Comp Sci.”
Wow… what a statement… imagine this, at one time they used to teach C and Fortran… imagine that, computer science some how progressed this far… I wonder who wanted to actually continue on in CS even when being exposed to that… ewww no garbage collection. Please leave out the extra junk, it just makes your post seem like such a waste of time rather than useful commentary.
April 17th, 2007 at 11:43 PM
“ewww no garbage collection.”
It wasn’t invented with Java, and the use of Java in CS strikes me more as kowtowing to expectations of career training for a job as a coder than as a serious attempt to explain concepts of computer science.
Imagine, some schools teach (or did teach) Lisp and Scheme. Amazing.
I’m hard pressed to believe that a course in Java is going to get anyone excited about a career in computer science. It’s not the worst language to use, but not the best either, so what’s the rationale? It certainly isn’t the presence of garbage collection.
Of all the languages that can be used to explore computer science, why not Smalltalk or Haskell or Io or Erlang or, perish the thought, C?
April 18th, 2007 at 10:52 AM
James,
I didn’t mean to make it sound like ‘garbage collection’ was something amazing invented with Java. I’m not a Java enthusiast or supporter, I’m just merely saying that I think it’s irrelevant and the comment you made was unnecessary. That’s all. I agree that students should try to learn beyond Java and experience true enlightenment, but I think this will fall into place based merely on their interest in programming.
As for your comment about Smalltalk, Haskell, etc. yeah, great… I’m still waiting for the 90% of professional developers to get it, nevermind the students. Oh wait.. maybe we’re on to something here…
April 18th, 2007 at 04:07 PM
James, I couldn’t disagree more.
There’s a solid body of literature on group decision-making which suggests that group diversity plays a major factor in the quality of the decision-making process. All things being equal, a group with members from different genders, races, backgrounds, ages, etc. will make better decisions than a more homogeneous group. So a commitment to letting other people have a say in what technology gets made is less idealistic than it is data-driven. Trying to hand-pick the folks who “actually know something” tends to be an exercise in reinforcing received wisdom rather than separating the wheat from the chaff. I mean, who decides who “actually knows something”—enterprise architects? Lisp hackers? Microsoft?
Also, a cognitive style associated with a subpopulation
- the “woman’s perspective” -doesn’t need to offer only virtuous differences to improve the decision-making process of groups. It only needs to shore up the group’s existing weak points in order to be valuable. To take a ridiculous example, imagine a subpopulation unable to conceive of the number 12- we’ll call them Episcopalians. A group of mathematicians might balk at the inclusion of an Episcopalian -what good is a mathematician who can’t work with the number twelve!—but the Episcopalian might bring much-needed skills to the table (say, for example, that Episcopalians are natural-born mediators, and could help resolve the arguments of the hot-tempered mathematicians).It’s not about whether or not women are good programmers—it’s about whether or not development teams with women on them outperform those without. The group is much more than the sum of its parts.
April 18th, 2007 at 10:00 PM
“I’m not a Java enthusiast or supporter, I’m just merely saying that I think it’s irrelevant and the comment you made was unnecessary.”
No, it was exactly the point of the NYT article. The claim was that not enough women are not attracted to CS. The article gave a quote from Dr. Cuny, who said that the AP course was a “disaster”, and who specifically referred to Java.
Java programming is boring. Java solves a particular set of application development issues in a smart, practical way. It is not, however, a good poster child for CompSci. That’s not the fault of Java, but it’s true and relevant to getting good people into the field.
It’s like trying to get people excited about architecture by teaching them how to run a cement mixer. Not everyone is going to think that intrinsically interesting, however practical it may be later on.
April 19th, 2007 at 12:57 AM
Coda—that same research (referenced in James Sierwiecki’s book) also indicates that the diversity of the group is only useful when it’s genuine, and not when somebody’s playing a token “Perspective X” role. When that happens, the alternative opinion is never really considered. If you’re getting women in there as token women, then they won’t be useful because nobody will take them seriously. The group has to be genuinely diverse for the diversity benefits to happen.
Anyway, Java not being a good choice for the AP test, that’s true, but I think that’s at most a symptom of a bigger problem.
April 19th, 2007 at 11:36 AM
Hey Giles!
I totally agree that the the much-derided and oft-elusive Pokemon diversity policy (“Now, to complete our roster we’ll need a transgendered !Kung teenager with milk allergies”) is broken but that doesn’t feel like the issue here. The article doesn’t even hint at such an approach.
I think people are looking around conferences, academia, the industry, and the field in general, noticing that it’s astonishingly White and male, and wondering where everyone else is and in this case, why there aren’t as many women as there used to be.
I think it’s a worthwhile cause to raise the issue of diversity in our field and to examine the social factors which have produced such a relatively homogeneous group. The alternative is to assume that White men are somehow genetically predisposed towards cubicles and pocket protectors. And that ain’t true.
(And personally, I think the “geek image” hypothesis doesn’t pan out – it doesn’t explain what makes a discipline “cool” or “geeky” and lends itself to half-baked, “Poochie the Dog”-esque, programmer-as-rock-star antics.)