Ted Leung on the air : Women and CS

Ted Leung on the air
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Fri, 07 May 2004

Kevin Schofield shares some of his knowledge about Margolis and Fisher's study on women in CS at CMU. Apparently there were (at least) two big issues that we causing women to leave the CMU CS program. I'm going to restate them here in my own words, and in a positive way, because they resonate with me as well (you should read Kevin's post in full anyway).

Women want to use computing to change the world.
Women want to work collaboratively to accomplish 1.

[22:41] | [computers] | # | TB | F | G | 3 Comments |

The two points in your summary are important, but Margolis & Fisher identified another that is just as important. Society sends a very strong message that computers are "boys' toys". There's an entire chapter in the book on this, and its effects. Reviewers of M&F's work coming from technical backgrounds (myself included) tend to gloss over this, because fixing it would require admitting that "geeks like us" are at fault, and need to change our behavior.

See http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gendergap/ for their project, and http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gendergap/working.html for their working papers.
Posted by Greg Wilson at Sat May 8 07:30:37 2004

Greg,

Thanks for the refs. I added the book to my already outrageously long Amazon wishlist...
Posted by Ted Leung at Sat May 8 23:46:03 2004

In grad school and elsewhere, the guys who made up most of my fellow-geeks were much nicer to me than they were to their male fellow-geeks. And any male geek who is feeling like part of the problem is probably not part of the problem. My daughter (age 4 at the time) once told me she'd learned that girls could grow up to be nurses but not doctors. What amazed me was that the friend who gave her this info was the daughter of a woman doctor.
Posted by Betsy Devine at Sun May 9 06:07:39 2004

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