What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html

by robg • 18 years ago

24 41 18 years ago

jleyank• 18 years ago

I have read that those who might do well in computer science choose a different field for their success. Face it, it's not the most financially rewarding career and the hours are probably worse than anything but Ob/Gyn professionals. Toss some "gender biases" (for lack of a better word) into the mix and it's no wonder why there's an estrogen shortage in the field.

vaksel• 18 years ago

don't forget the constant need to refresh your skills. Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes, and the few that do have refreshes that basically involve a 3 hour seminar. Computer Science you gotta be on the cutting edge of technology all the time.

And unlike other fields where you basically take a 3 hour seminar to get up to speed, learning a new programming language takes a ton more time.

And like you said, its really not that much more financially rewarding than other fields

bbgm• 18 years ago

That doesn't explain why there are so much women in biology (for example) where the techniques, required skill and knowledge base change every few months or so it seems, and it isn't exactly financially rewarding.

llimllib2• 18 years ago

> Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes

You mean to tell me that being a doctor requires less continuing education than CS? Really? You sure you can back that up?

Zev• 18 years ago

I wonder what the impact of having an article that goes "Why aren't women interested in Computer Science" every other month has on this sort of thing..

iigs• 18 years ago

It's a bit presumptive to call men the reference case and to ask what's wrong with {universities, women} that has caused a drop in female enrollment. Maybe a better question is: Why are there so many men in computer science.

The article's author doesn't seem to really make an effort to figure out what happened, other than to reference one individual who went into health care.

I think exploring this question to its fullest would require dropping some politically correct guards and questioning quite a few gender assumptions, something that neither web forums nor national newspapers are particularly good forums for.

ken• 18 years ago

Yep. You'd need somebody with absolutely no shame ... like Phil Greenspun!

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

"[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD."

"A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that they've made a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have chosen to stick with the choice that they made at age 18"

nandemo• 18 years ago

"[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD."

This is odd for at least 2 reasons: 1) It's really hard to believe that getting a MD is "less work and risk" than getting a degree in CS. 2) At least in my country, most people who are interested in CS or engineering wouldn't even consider becoming doctors. It's not about money.

hugh• 18 years ago

"[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD."

Oh, come now. I see a lot of over-the-top programmer glorification on this site, but this takes the cake.

I know plenty of complete dolts who managed to get degrees in CS, and who went on to have reasonably rewarding careers. At no point were their grades (nor their general levels of ability) high enough to get them anywhere near law school, let alone medical school.

Now maybe you, dear reader, could have easily got into medical or law school, but the vast majority of your classmates couldn't.

rbanffy• 18 years ago

Let me rephrase your question:

"What's wrong with, say, Psychology, that makes so few men enroll?" or "Why there are so few men graduating from fashion schools?"

I agree that looking at the whole picture explains it better than looking at a very small part of it and wondering, "if 50% of this picture is mostly green, why all I see is blue?". The answer could be simple: maybe you are looking at the sky.

When I graduated in a, say, 50 people class, 4 of them were women. Apart from the fact that we went to separate toilets, there was not much of a difference.

known2• 18 years ago

Men and Women have distinct and different priorities in life.

jerf3• 18 years ago

Personally, after all the efforts of the past couple of decades to get women involved in college have succeeded to the point that women now make up the majority of college students (with the trends continuing to favor even more women for the forseeable future), if computer science is actually still dropping, the possibility that it is simply an outlier must be taken seriously.

If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender ratios will be normally distributed. So, I mean outlier in the technical sense of a statistical distribution. There will be extremes at one end or another, and the mere fact of their existence is testimony that gender differences of a statistical nature do indeed exist, not proof that there is some other factor. If we actually got all professions to strict 50/50 proportions, that would be proof positive of major meddling.

I mean that first paragraph seriously. In the absence of such efforts, discrimination of some form would be a plausible hypothesis, but given how many other fields have overcome this and the dominant culture of universities, I find it increasingly difficult to believe the members of the field are really the problem. Computer scientists can hardly be blamed for a culture that considers them nerds and tells girls they shouldn't be nerds, if that is the root problem. (Nor will the obvious solutions work; protesting that you aren't really nerds is not a good approach. Making tons of money was a reasonably effective approach, though that has lost its apparent inevitability. :) )

SamReidHughes3• 18 years ago

> If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender ratios will be normally distributed.

I don't see any reason why they would be normally distributed. Their weighted average would be the general gender proportion among students, but there's nothing that says or implies the distribution would be normal. One could imagine an extremely different scenario, a species with every field being populated entirely by one gender, and one could imagine a species where a few fields (say, engineering fields) are strongly preferred by one gender while the rest are equally preferred among non-engineering students. There's no reason why the human species is one where these ratios are distributed normally. And if it were, it would be entirely by coincidence.

jerf3• 18 years ago

> I don't see any reason why they would be normally distributed.

The odds of the Central Limit Theorem failing to apply here seem extraordinarily low. I am one of the people who think it tends to be overapplied, but this is exactly the sort of scenario where it applies very strongly.

Speculating about species with alternative gender breakdowns with non-normal distributions has no effect on the fact that in humans our gender differences are very much normally distributed in almost every way relevant to the discussion of what career one would choose. Yes, such a species is biologically plausible, but what is, is.

alaithea4• 18 years ago

I am a woman who has been programming professionally, on and off, for about 9 years, and full-time at a corporate job for two and a half of those. I was the first woman to be hired as a software developer at my workplace in almost 25 years. I hate my job, and next fall, I will enter grad school to go into an allied health profession. My reasons for leaving full-time software development are as follows:

1) The social interaction leaves something to be desired at my job, especially if you are not into gaming or D&D. There are few coworkers with whom I can discuss non-geek topics such as travel or food. This is probably due, at least in part, to having so few women around. The guys constantly revel in their geekitude. It gets old.

2) The work itself is isolating. I love to code, but especially during the long, depressing months of winter, I long for meetings to go to, or phone calls to receive.

3) Similar to the last point: I'd like to have a reason to leave my desk several times a day, for periods longer than it takes to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. The highly sedentary nature of the job starts to make it feel like a prison.

In contrast to the last couple of points, my male coworkers act as though they would be happy if they never had to leave their desk chair to go to another meeting. Maybe this is just personality, and not a gender difference. Maybe I don't love programming enough to lose myself in it for hours at a time. I think some of these things, however, especially the social issues, may be indicative of basic female needs to have a connection with others, a feeling of being nurtured (and nurturing others), and good (female) role models. It would be interesting to see a workplace in which the majority of developers are women.

I recall reading about a study recently in which they found that men tended to concentrate in the hard sciences (math, physics), where women preferred sciences with a human aspect (psychology, biology). I believe they found that even women who had entered the hard sciences often ended up leaving them for fields with a more human touch.

tapostrophemo• 18 years ago

That's too bad. (I'm male, btw.) Where I work, on an Agile team, we have lots of social interaction. We try to pair with a different developer every day. Each story card (requrement) we implement involves much back-and-forth conversaction between us (the developers) and the users (or more often, but not always, their "representatives" - the Business Analysts).

Aside from that, I don't think D & D has come up once the whole time I've been on that team (3+ years). Between being busy with the work we're doing, and the rest of the world's events to discuss, there's no time for games. Politics. The stock market. Parenthood. (Non-parenthood for the single guys and girls too.) Professional sports. Dumb jokes. Etc.

alaithea4• 18 years ago

I also work on a quasi-agile team. We do pair programming, but we often get assigned to the same pair for weeks or months at a time. It's sort of like being in an arranged marriage. I've told management time and again that this doesn't turn out well, to no avail.

Granted, pair programming does offer interaction. The hours go more quickly while pairing. However, I often prefer to work alone when I can, so that I can have some semblance of privacy and personal space in our bull-pen work environment.

I have to say that the recent financial turmoil and U.S. election have lead the conversation away from D&D, the latest video game, or the plots of Star Trek episodes. It has been a welcome change of pace. We have dumb jokes, too. The puns, ohhh the puns. ;)

blackguardx2• 18 years ago

I am a man and I feel the same way. I recently graduated and have been working as a hardware designer for the past year and a half. I find cube life very depressing and am increasingly losing my motivation.

I have better social interaction, though. My work has people who are hard to converse with because of their lack of social skills but the majority of people aren't like that.

Even though I hate sitting in my cubicle all day, I really don't like most meetings because the information discussed isn't interesting and my eyes glaze over. People get into pointless arguments and I sit there hoping for the meeting to end. The only meetings that I like are design meetings, but most of our meetings just cover status updates.

I yearn for a job that doesn't involve sitting in front of a computer all day. I love hardware design and programming, but 8 hours a day of it is very taxing. I suffer from RSI in my wrists and have yet to find a long lasting remedy.

Maybe the best option would be to start my own hardware or software company. Working for someone else just adds to the dreariness. Other than that, I have been thinking about becoming a doctor.

alaithea4• 18 years ago

Your point about starting a business is a good one. I initially learned programming while self-employed as a web designer back in the wee days of the web. On my own, I always wore more hats than just "code monkey," and that made a difference. Not to mention that when you're self-employed, you can go take a walk outdoors, etc., anytime you like. I guess a predilection for self-employment is why most of us are here reading Hacker News.

At risk of going off-topic: I, too, suffer from RSI. As a programmer and musician, it is a double whammy for me. I have found many short-term solutions, but have recently experienced some astonishing relief from reading The Mindbody Prescription by Dr. Sarno (I believe someone here on HN mentioned it). If you think you would be open to the idea of RSI as a disorder originating in the brain as a result of buried emotional tension, you should check it out.

aswanson3• 18 years ago

I would advise you to make some time of move now to discover what you really want to do with your career. I remember having the same sorts of feelings at that point in my career but ignoring them. Ten years later, guess who is still a cube dweller? Do something orthogonal to what you have been NOW.

tsuraan• 18 years ago

I suffer from RSI in my wrists and have yet to find a long lasting remedy.

A bit off-topic, obviously, but I've found that rock climbing is really great for the wrists. Starting senior year, I developed unbearable wrist pain from too much typing. After being unable to type for more than an hour or so at a time for almost a year, I started climbing at a local climbing gym, and for the past couple of years I've been able to program all day without any pain. It's worth trying, if you haven't tried that already.

known2• 18 years ago

To be a good programer we need to insulate our mind from rest of the world. I believe women cannot efford to do this by nature (due to mother's role etc)

dgabriel3• 18 years ago

I am also a woman software engineer, but my workplace is significantly different from yours. I'm the principal software engineer at a university with a commitment to diversity, and my team consists of 7 men and 6 women (3 developers, 1 dba, 2 QE). We're an agile workplace, so every day we have several meetings, including the stand-up, code reviews, and meetings with our partners. I don't think anyone is into gaming, but you might find the baby talk tedious (2 of us are pregnant, myself with twins, and virtually everyone has a family). The elusive "human touch," feels intrinsic to this job. However, it took me a long time to find the ideal workplace, so I fully understand your frustration.

For years, I was the one&only technical woman in the different companies I worked for. That can be very difficult, especially in a start-up environment where (depending on the culture), the atmosphere can be as sexually charged as a college dorm. I've had supervisors hit on me & grope me at parties. Another boss told me he was going to replace me with a nice, docile set of Geisha programmers, or sell me into white slavery if the start-up folded. The new sales guy at one place asked me to get him coffee, and when I explained that wasn't my job, he said I was "too hot to be a programmer." I was not flattered.

And then there are the message boards where hoards of young men post their opinions about women being intrinsically incapable of hacking. You have to have a really, really thick skin to be a woman in this line of work.

aswanson3• 18 years ago

We're an agile workplace, so every day we have several meetings

Is that what agile is about, multiple meetings every day? That would drive me nuts. How can you concentrate on problems in that type of environment? I don't mind social interaction but that seems over the top.

alaithea4• 18 years ago

I suppose that despite the relative lack of women studying computer science at universities (I didn't), universities do tend to be ideal places to find kick-ass women doing both the job thing and the family thing. That sounds great to me, and I think I'd much prefer baby talk over the geeky alternatives.

Only one person on our eight-person team has kids. As for the others, I'm not sure if some of them have ever been on a date. Dealing with frustrated young men is... frustrating in and of itself. I'd just like to see some more balance and worldliness from my coworkers.

Despite the lack of other women, I have been lucky to be in a pretty egalitarian workplace. I generally feel respected, and many of our executives are women. That said, I have had less than tactful coworkers take a two minute break near my desk to stare at my chest and stuff snacks in their face, like it was some kind of show. That was fun. (<-sarcasm)

ryanwaggoner• 18 years ago

Math.

j/k :-)

viggity• 18 years ago

obviously, the cause is men and their evil penises of death!

Hexstream2• 18 years ago

Or their inappropriate phallic references, perhaps.

yummyfajitas• 18 years ago

Statistics FAIL.

>Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85,

Women have achieved "broad parity" in one other science and engineering field: biology (pre-med). This accounts for a large number of bachelors degrees in science, but it does not account for a large number of technical pursuits.

(Actually, women also make up a largish chunk of math majors at schools which don't offer math education as a separate degree. )

CS looks a lot like most other math heavy science fields, like physics, electrical/mechanical engineering and operations research.

time_management• 18 years ago

I think it boils down to a couple of factors: (1) women, understandably, loathe asking men for permission to do things, and (2) if they want to have children, they can't take nearly as many risks in their early years.

Item 1 essentially rules out mainstream corporate environments, which are still the nasty, vulgar, dumb white boy's world they've been for centuries. It also makes VC-backed startups uncompelling, because although startup engineers and VCs are more refined than mainstream corporates, VCs are still mostly men.

Moreover, most people want to have children, and while men who want to have kids can wait until their 50s, women can't. This means that men can take more risks when they're young, and it's why, for example, academia is unappealing: it's a career where you need someone's permission (tenure) to start your adult life, and usually don't get it until your late 30s.

A lot of the very-smart women who would be entering computer science choose, instead, to become doctors, because medicine's a much better career from this perspective. 1. The risk is low. 2. If you're good, you don't have to ask anyone for permission. (This isn't true in tech; you still need VC.) 3. You have pretty much free rein over whether or not you want to be rich and work long hours, or moderately wealthy with a relaxed work schedule.

dgabriel3• 18 years ago

Uh, maybe, but as a female software engineer, I can tell you I'm doing ok on the cusp of my thirties with one kid & two more currently baking. I have my labor-of-love python project on the side, which may or may not ever get backing, and another startup I'm working on with my partner. If I don't get around to launching a company until I'm 40, that's cool, too.

However, as far as the attitudes of men, particularly men without families, or with families they have completely foisted off onto their wives, you are correct about the nasty, dumb, vulgar stuff.

syntax-case• 18 years ago

"How do you write women so well?" ...

What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?

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