There was an article on Digg a while ago about how we should get more women and minorities interested in tech and CS. The main consensus in the comments was that women should be responsible for getting themselves interested. I have to say they have a point. All these articles keep saying how women are pushed out of tech careers because people discourage them. Have any of you ever been discouraged from pursuing a career in tech?
The only thing that may have deterred me was the all male dominated classes in HS. Sitting in a room with all boys at the height of their immaturity: NOT FUN. If any of you remember, I was forced to take junior engineering before I could take the programming course my school offered. I got to sit at a table with all freshmen boys and listen to them discuss the red head’s fire crotch all period. Not to mention their incredible level of stupidity that managed to take me by surprise daily. Not just them, but our teacher too. Dude, if you don’t know how to use a ruler, you shouldn’t be teaching a technology course. On the bright side, they all thought I was a genius. The programming class was better, but I was still a little lonely without any girls to chat with. College was infinitely better, but the classes were also a hundred times harder.
What do I think keeps most women away from CS. They think it’s too hard. I would tell pharmacy students, bio students, and chem students that I was a CS major and they would say, “omg, that’s so hard!” I’d be like, are you freaking kidding me??? CS is hard, but it’s not that hard. They purposely make the second class for the major impossible to weed out the non-serious students, but after that, it’s easier. They never even get to the second class though. The first one’s hard enough for them. Why? I guess you have to learn to think in a certain way and if you never did programming before, it can be difficult. Most girls aren’t exposed to programming pre-college, so that could make it more challenging. They don’t go to computer camp and take CS classes in HS. Not just because they were filled with male geeks, they probably weren’t even interested in CS and never even bothered to think of taking a CS course.
Why the lack of interest? Girls are very social, especially in HS. Programmers aren’t known to be social people. Girls want to work in groups and discuss things. When you think of CS the first thing that comes to mind is a guy alone in a cubicle coding away. Most of the girls I know in CS are either a little socially awkward or get along with guys better than they do with girls making them suitable for picking up CS earlier on. That or they’re really good at math and wanted to make money or they’re genuinely fascinated by CS.
This particular article said that if we could get girls to think of programming as more of an art than say math, they may be more interested. I say, have kids take mandatory HS programming courses. They can split the class up into groups and each group designs and builds whatever sort of program they want, something fun. Sure the real world isn’t like that, unless you work at google anyway, but it may be enough to get girls interested. Once something’s fun and interesting, it becomes easier to learn and the hard isn’t so hard anymore. They’ll think, hey, I can do this fun thing for a living and make money, maybe I’ll try that!
There’s no need for special programs just for girls and minorities because they’re not at a disadvantage. They have the same opportunities to study CS as the white nerds do, they just don’t take them! They don’t take them because they don’t want to! Our only obligation is to help them see that it can be fun and interesting, as opposed to hard and boring, so it becomes something they would consider studying.
–edit– I should do more of these posts, I had no idea people would actually read this! To respond to some of the comments:
There is definitely a lot more group work in the real world. I hated in most of my CS classes, we couldn’t ask anyone else for help with an assignment because that would be cheating. Ridiculous! We helped eachother anyway, but it only works if you have friends in your class. If you don’t know anyone, you’re at a disadvantage. This is another reason why there should be more group work in school.
A lot of engineering and computer related jobs are out sourced in the US and it can be hard to find a job in the industry
That’s another problem. A lot of people think it’s hard to find a job, but it’s really not! Not enough people are going into CS. A lot of companies are getting desperate especially for girls/minorities. I had absolutely no job experience and I got a job like that *snaps fingers*. Well, maybe it was a little more difficult, but I had two offers before I graduated and my friends had jobs lined up well before that. Even the guys.
–/edit–
LOL, nope, never been discouraged from Computer Science just because there’s a lot of guys. I’ve never had male-dominated classes in high school, though, so maybe that’s why that never deterred me. In college, it’s not so bad, and I’m now used to it. LOL. And you’re right, it isn’t so bad, but it definitely is 100 times harder!!
LOL about other students thinking Computer Science is hard. Yeah, you’re right, it’s hard, but not that hard. Oh, and as for the 2nd class being the hardest… Hey! My school has that too! Hahah, and the funny thing is that I had with the easiest professor in the department(the professor with one of the classes I’m taking this semester)! LOL!
LOL about the girls in Computer Science. Hmm… Right now, I believe that I get along better with guys. Hahah. I don’t know, though, but that’s how it has turned out lately. =P
Anyways, hmm about the mandatory programming class. We had to take one in back in high school, and it was for the programming language, Basic, and my sister hated it, while it was ok for me.
But yeah, Computer Science requires A LOT of critical thinking, so maybe that’s what deters a lot of girls/people in general? LOL.
I think this is a key point. “Girls want to work in groups and discuss things.” The funny thing is, in actual real-world programming, there’s a lot of working in groups and discussing things. There are popular programming methodologies (XP, obviously) that say writing code should always be a 2-person activity. Comparatively very little software is written by people working alone in a massive singular effort. But it’s still taught that way. I interview people out of college who have rarely or never worked on a team to build a software project in their lives.
While I certainly don’t mean to play into stereotypes, and adults can make their own choices about how to live their lives independent of their gender, it’s hard to argue that there are huge differences between boys and girls around middle school to early high school ages; and that’s when people are mainly choosing their paths for the future. It’s also when this programming as a solitary effort idea is most strongly embraced. Quite unfortunate.
Of course, people who actually look into female participation in computer science and engineering fields will tell you that it looks like a “leaky pipeline” — i.e., there are higher rates of women leaving at each stage all the way up through graduate schools and places of employment; not just at early ages. The million dollar question, though, is whether that comes from failings all the way through the educational system, or simply from women leaving fields where they find themselves feeling more and more out of place due to the cascading effect of early gender disparities. I have always suspected the latter.
I have to pick a nit about the “more of an art than math” bit. Real math is also done by people working together in teams, getting together often to bounce around ideas, checking each other’s work, giving talks to colleagues, and so on. There’s a whole lot of style and art to it. Again, this is a disparity between the way math is taught in schools and the way it is actually practiced.
Well, here in the country, CS is not a popular course anymore. It’s nursing and the dream to go abroad and sh1t. :p
You may add the popularity as one of the reasons.
Hey, I’m digging this. Nice thoughts.
Along with what Simply Precious said, I don’t think programming should be mandatory either. A lot of high school subjects shouldn’t mandatory in my opinion. High school should teach you the thing that will help you with what you want to do in a career life. Example: I want to be an auto mechanic, I should not have to take biology/anatomy, unless you want to say that your phalanges where ripped off by the cooling fan while trying to change spark plugs on engine that was running.
As for females in the CS, I have seen lot of females that where interested in CS, but i think the male domination and the stereo type do put off a lot of females.
Laarni does have another point. A lot of engineering and computer related jobs are out sourced in the US and it can be hard to find a job in the industry where medical is really becoming the winning industry in the means of demand.
Most of the people I “know” who are in Computer Science are people online. The girls that I know tend to stick with things like Business as do the guys. I myself used to be a Business major, but went to design, not because I thought it suited me more “as a girl”, but because I wanted to do it. I would not say that CS is hard, but if it were actually to be hard, it’s because my interests are not aligned with the study. I’ve always leaned towards arts and humanities because I love to do it, and my inclinations and potential was clearly in the arts in the obvious sense rather than something that is seen as perhaps more obviously/generally “empirical” (for the lack of a better word).
And although it sounds really simplistic, I think at the end of the day, regardless of gender, if you believe you can pursue a course, then do it. Your gender should not hinder you. Personally I commend you for doing something that you love and sticking to your guns.
I just wanted to respond back to your edit, about the whole jobs thing. Maybe it’s where you go to school and/or the place you live? Because I have some friends who found jobs really easy, while others aren’t having the best luck…
OK, in the NYC area there’s an abundance of jobs. But really, if you accept a salary low enough, there’s some pretty lame jobs I’ve seen (tech support and testing mostly) that would be easy to get. A lot also depends on the school and GPA. AT&T for instance won’t even look at resumes that have GPA’s under a certain number and are only actively recruiting at specific schools.