Thank you for that; it definitely provided a perspective that I hadn't thought of previously.
However, I don't know that I agree that if people were encouraged the same that it would somehow make the balance 50/50 or even remotely close to that. Of course, my perspective is limited to personal experience.
I have a lot of geeky girls in my family and I know a lot of women who are geeks, and they've all been interested in other geeky pursuits - medicine, psychology, civil engineering, EE, chemistry; none of them have had a remote interest in software specifically. Why? Because it was too boring for them.
Maybe we should bring it on ourselves to make the work seem more interesting if we really want to try to bring some balance to the gender mix.
I think Fran Allen (the only female interviewee in Coders at Work) made the point that you see more and more women going into Earth Sciences, Biology, Chemistry... Even Engineering and Maths have more balanced gender ratios than CS. Her opinion was that it was because those fields are perceived to be more socially relevant, wheras a lot of people think CS is just about making games.
I don't know if I agree with her totally (I think the negative perception is more a conflation of IT with CS - people think CS is more about using Powerpoint than an intellectual pursuit) - but there is definitly a case for fixing the public perception of Computer Scientists.
It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception.
I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.
Comments
Thank you for that; it definitely provided a perspective that I hadn't thought of previously.
However, I don't know that I agree that if people were encouraged the same that it would somehow make the balance 50/50 or even remotely close to that. Of course, my perspective is limited to personal experience.
I have a lot of geeky girls in my family and I know a lot of women who are geeks, and they've all been interested in other geeky pursuits - medicine, psychology, civil engineering, EE, chemistry; none of them have had a remote interest in software specifically. Why? Because it was too boring for them.
Maybe we should bring it on ourselves to make the work seem more interesting if we really want to try to bring some balance to the gender mix.
I think Fran Allen (the only female interviewee in Coders at Work) made the point that you see more and more women going into Earth Sciences, Biology, Chemistry... Even Engineering and Maths have more balanced gender ratios than CS. Her opinion was that it was because those fields are perceived to be more socially relevant, wheras a lot of people think CS is just about making games.
I don't know if I agree with her totally (I think the negative perception is more a conflation of IT with CS - people think CS is more about using Powerpoint than an intellectual pursuit) - but there is definitly a case for fixing the public perception of Computer Scientists.
It may seem boring to them, but we know that it isn't - at all. To me, chemistry seems boring. It's a problem of perception.
I can easily imagine a society where 90%+ of the programmers are women, where programming is thought of as a typically female profession, requiring skills such as accuracy and conscientiousness.