You lost me at "performance at Maths A-Level is the best indicator of performance at degree level Computer Science". I'm a crap to mediocre mathematician, like many people I'm just not a natural. After dragging myself through the Maths part of a foundation course I got a reasonable result for it (my original Maths AS-Level was appalling).
But in comparison my Computer Science achievement has been extremely good. I think you can be a fantastic software developer without being a fantastic mathematician. I put this down to other attributes more important to programming success such as perseverance, a dogged willingness to learn and problem solving skills.
I agree mathematicians can make great algorithmic thinkers capable of solving very complex academic problems, but in terms of development, software engineering, solving business problems and shipping software, I don't think it necessarily helps.
development, software engineering, solving business problems and shipping software
These aren't exactly what Computer Science programs focus on. There's a lot more theory (algorithms, data structures, etc.) and less practice in my experience. Working through the MIT algorithms book (CLRS) will be rough without the requisite math background. My MIS program was much more focused on the things you listed than my CS program was.
The bigger issue here is that programming and computer science are related, but not as much as you might think. It's like saying that if your main goal is to be a proficient writer you should study English literature in college. There are lots of kinds of writing and writing is useful in any field, and besides which studying English literature might make you a slightly better writer, but you shouldn't necessarily major in it if that's your goal.
I think it's a real travesty that somehow "programming" got parked under "computer science" and hasn't made its way as a staple into other programs.
Statistically it is, hence universities using it for selection purposes. But that only means that someone who did badly at A-Level Maths will do badly at degree level on average.
I think the point is that of the information available on students, math performance is the best indicator for cs performance.
Obviously there are outliers (such as yourself). However I don't think there are any reasonably objective statistics for many of the other qualities you have mentioned.
Reading this article, the thought occurred to me that perhaps it's the "building stuff" part of computing that women aren't as interested in, as opposed to the "math" part, which is the typical culprit.
Interestingly, via the table at the end of that article, the two professional occupations which had even less participation from women than computing are: Architects, and Civil Engineers.
In Comp Sci, Architecture and Civ Eng you basically have to make it stable, make it work and—least & last—make it pretty. Fashion and Design have slightly different priorities.
I wonder what kind of gender ratio UX, UI and IA have.
I once tried to comment with a thought (not mine, don't remember the source) that men are more into "stuff" and women are more into relationships, but was downvoted instantly.
Agreed! I've always thought that it's an innate-ish lack of affinity towards machines that's partially responsible.
Human infant females show a toy bias away from toys modeling machines, and even female baby primates of other species prefer soft toys (interestingly, the infant male rhesus monkeys show no preference between the "boy" and "girl" toys; but the females actually show a preference away from trucks and other mechanical toys.)
You need to both have an affinity for machines and mathematical thinking.
This article is vacuous. It claims to be able to disprove the "wrong arguments" for the issues with data, but the only data appearing at all is simply the reiteration of the fact that there aren't many women in Computer Science, and then some logic that does not follow from the raw data. You can't get to causation from there. It's not even showing correlations of particular interest (we already know women are in other disciplines of varying relatedness), let alone causation. This is argument-by-flurry-of-words(-and-graphs).
"Dislikes working with computers" is a new argument you just made; the article cited "Working with computers is a "solitary" activity which attracts more men than women", IT is not particularly a solitary activity in practice. Not like programming can be, though the solitariness seems overstated to me there too. It doesn't do anything to disprove the assertion that there is something about programming particularly distasteful to women, the real argument. (Which I am neither advancing nor attacking here.)
Like I said, all this article "showed" was a reiteration that there are "no" women in programming. You can't get to causation from there.
Besides, if you're going to argue that because women go into IT you can disprove some things, you need to take it all the way, not just use it to prove a couple of pet points then run away from the other implications, like the fact that there are obviously no systematic barriers to women in IT, and it seems rather unlikely to me that there are systematic barriers to programming occupations that don't exist in IT. Certainly I'd like to see one demonstrated rather than asserted if it's going to be the core of your argument. So using this same data we can plausibly argue that the data shows that there is something about programming that women legitimately of their own free will prefer on average not to do.
This is not the argument I am advancing; if I were I'd be refining it a lot more. My point for this post is that there mere fact that I can use this data in favor of such an argument is proof that the data proves nothing. It's not enough. (Trying to disprove the previous paragraph in a reply would be entirely missing my point.)
I didn't think the article was vacuous at all; the A-level and GSCE data were very interesting. And I thought it was great that you included a section on "why it matters".
On the other hand, you didn't really disprove the myths. So a different headline and organization might be helpful, focusing on your core arguments: A-level choices are a big contributor to the lack of women in computing; the number of women choosing math IT implies that it's not aversion to technology or math; GSCE and A-level scores imply that it's not a matter of ability. Then design your graphs to show that more clearly. And it would have been helpful to include references to other data supporting these points -- there's bunches of references at http://geekfeminism.org/2010/05/31/ask-a-geek-feminist-the-d...
A similar article could be written asking why so few men go into elementary school teaching or nursing. Men are just as qualified as women for these positions, but pursue them at a far lower rate than women do. Looking at qualifications clearly isn't enough. The hard question to answer is why so many qualified women choose careers other than CS.
In the UK at least, the answer to that is obvious - the government assumes that any male who wishes to work with children is a paedophile and the onus is on him to prove otherwise. So men simply refuse to endure that systematic humiliation.
There are actually no barriers to women working in IT other than their personal interest in doing so.
I think the suggested reaons for the importance of equal gender distribution of software developer are exaggerated.
Not being able to code is by far not as severe as not being able to write and read. Literacy enables you to take part in society, and prevents you from being cheated in all parts of life.
While it's true that compentence in using software is increasingly important, it will always be a small fraction of the population who is able (or willing) to actually produce the technology.
It is important to be able to drive a car, but nobody considers it harmful that not everybody can build one.
PS: I would love to see more female developers, but they should be in the field for the love of it, not because someone else told them it's important for their career.
Software development is now the 7th most common graduate-level profession for men in the UK. It's more common than teaching. It's easy to miss how pervasive software development is becoming.
Even in non-software fields like finance and marketing, you see more and more jobs requiring the ability to put together models in VBA, etc.
My point wasn't that it's not useful to be able to program.
A lot of things are useful and pervasive (like motors), but being able to read is just uncomparably more important. The article claims that it has the same degree of importance, and that's totally exaggerated IMHO.
The divide between the cans and cannots of computers is wider I think than the car building industry. Most children won't build a car at school but they probably will learn how to drill a hole in a piece of metal, mould plastic, stitch upholstery or some basic electronics.
It's not harmful that someone can use amazon or google without being able to build it, but surely there is a value and even a necessity for people to be able to write "Hello, World!" in html and understand how that relates to the professional enterprises.
This is straight up begging the question. The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it.
I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage collection, snow plowing, roadkill removal, framing, or masonry. And framing in particular includes plenty of math when it comes to laying out rafters to build the roof.
I think it has to do with type of computer gaming that boys gravitate to which encourages experimentation with the computer (swapping out video cards, adding RAM, etc) that I just don't think young girls are encouraged (or motivated by slow specs) to do.
> The article is taking it as fact that we should fix it.
Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men, our field is missing out on roughly half the population of brilliant minds that could be inventing the Next Big Thing. No?
Edit: OK. Summary of the answers so far. A) Cannot necessarily make the above assumption. B) Women on average may be as intelligent as men but they will never be geniuses like Einstein (or likely to go to prison). and C) We don't need that many engineers anyways.
Well, the key is in that assumption, and also in the shape of that data. It could be that the average woman is slightly more intelligent than the average man: 55% of American college freshmen are female. But men have a greater variance which brings them out at both ends. So the outlying geniuses like Einstein and Jobs and Feynman tend to be male, and at the other end so does the prison population.
Steve Jobs is a genius of the likes of Einstein and Feynman? I know that Apple fanboyism is rampant in tech circles but it's getting out of hand, really. ;)
Assuming that women are every bit as intelligent as men,
That is a) an unproven assumption and b) irrelevant. The right thing to measure is the integral of P(inventing next big thing | intelligence = g, enters computing) P(intelligence = g) dg. (This also assumes g is the only factor, not ambition or other factors, but whatever).
A not so terrible substitute for that would be measuring the ratios of men and women with intelligence over some cutoff . This could bew considerably lower even if women are every bit as intelligent as men, if for example the variance of women's intelligence was lower.
No way is the conclusion that they should stay in the kitchen. The conclusion is that maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions, not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in these fields.
I think that the reason people fail to understand why there are so few women in software development is because they frame the issue the way you just did. They think about how to convince a young woman that engineering is better than home economics.
Instead, try this as an exercise: imagine you're a career counselor at a university, and a very bright young woman has just entered your office asking for advice. She's a top student who can handle math, science, and arts/humanities, and she's got the chops to score in the high percentiles on whatever standardized test is required for a grad program.
Imagine a conversation where you try to talk her out of becoming a cardiologist and sell her on a grad program in computer science. Make sure you consider employment prospects, earnings potential, social prestige, job stability at age 48, and so forth.
This conversation will demonstrate why it's not engineering vs staying in the kitchen. Young women are starting to out-achieve young men in the US, and I'd be surprised if this isn't the case in the UK.
People (who are aware that the achievement gap is now starting to favor women) often think of the scarcity of women in engineering as a dark spot in an otherwise bright picture, but one that should still be remedied. I think they're missing the possibility that the evident aversion women have to engineering or CS is actually a positive thing for women - that women have realized that they can achieve more real power and influence in other fields. By "better off" I'm not talking about some condescending "oh, you'll be happier at home with the kids" kind of thing. I mean wealthy, high income, highly influential, positions of power in business and government kind of "better off".
Now for a slightly lame backtrack - I actually do think that science and engineering are amazing fields, and the scarcity of women is a complicated thing - especially at the undergraduate level (after all, the most common academic background at the bachelor's level for fortune 500 CEOs is engineering in the US). However, I do think that the perspective I described above needs to be a big part of the analysis. People seem to view the low participation of women in certain technical fields as a negative for women without adequately understanding the other things women are doing and the possibility that they may be making better choices than men.
> maybe women are better off in medicine, law, dentistry or other processions, not because they're women, but because most people would be better off in these fields.
really?
if you had a teenage son or younger brother, would you be encouraging them to be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer? or would you be encouraging them to learn about computers, software, networking, mobile phones, social networks, the cloud, the web, and all the other cool things we love that are changing the world?
I would encourage my child to pursue his or her own passions My goal is to expose my kids to a broad range of fields, and strive to ensure that they are well educated enough to understand and make wise decisions about their own lives.
But if we're concerned about how women aren't going into graduate engineering or CS programs, that means we think something's wrong with their choice, right? It might not be their fault. It could be discrimination, an unfriendly environment, a lack of friendly encouragement (or a lack of pressure, which also works, though often at the expense of the person's happiness).
So think of it this way - if my daughter was interested in following grandpa's steps and going into medicine rather than dad's steps and going into computing, I certainly wouldn't discourage her.
BTW, I've posted about an article from the RAND foundation about the "shortage" of science and engineering PhDs in the US (it's easy to find on their site). RAND found that this is, essentially, a rational reaction to poor prospects and pay relative to the professions. I understand we're not robots, passion matters. But when researchers are RAND are reaching this conclusion, it starts to be very difficult to hold the position that women are somehow losing out by choosing professions over grad programs in CS/Eng.
okay, suppose your son is like most smart teenagers: he loves hanging out with his friends on social networks and talking on the phone, video games, and talking with other smart people who share his interests. he hates going to the doctor and the dentist and thinks that most lawyers don't add a lot to society. he likes all his classes: math, science, english. what would you recommend to him?
> it starts to be very difficult to hold the position that women are somehow losing out by choosing professions over grad programs in CS/Eng.
but that's not what this article was about. we're talking choices at 16 years old, long before people have chosen a specialty.
Discussions like this have a way of revealing people who, when the facts don't support their assumptions, like to resort to making ad-hominem attacks on people who disagree with them.
If you search through my history, you'll find lots of material for your "HN is so mean" page. Not just sexism, anti-gay/pro graph theorist material as well (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183868).
But just a nit - I'm no longer at Courant, my webpage is stale.
> I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage
> collection, snow plowing, roadkill removal, framing, or
> masonry.
Was going to say something similar. Is nobody afraid that "by neglecting female adoption we're creating the potential for huge disenfranchisement issues in the future."
I also saw a comment on reddit stating, that while being 54% of the workforce
males account for more than 90% of work-related deaths. Chocking on billions must be the most likely cause then :(
>
Actually the article has a section on "Why it matters". Including this:
There's a huge shortage of software developers in the UK, the number of software development roles is increasing by approximately 10,000/year. The UK just isn't producing enough talented software developers to meet the demand. When it comes to expanding the talent pool it makes sense to target the groups who are most under-represented.
But it is also an issue for society as whole. Having a 90:10 ratio of males to females for software development should be as shocking as having a 90:10 ratio for literacy. Software development is fast becoming one of the fundamental skills of the 21st century as technology starts to dominate every industry. Of the 26 billionaires the web has produced in the last decade, only one has been female. Only a tiny fraction of technology companies started today are started by female technologists. By neglecting female adoption we're creating the potential for huge disenfranchisement issues in the future.
But that is completely spurious. Let me tell you a story. I get coffee every morning on the way to work, in London, and at the place I go, everyone who works there is Polish. Now, my fondness of all things Eastern European is well known but even so - is it not insane that we apparently have such a "shortage" of coffee makers in the UK that we have to fly people in from 700 miles away to do it?
And as for your next point, that's spurious too. Was there ever a time when the UK - or any country - fretted that not enough people were being trained to make paper and pens? That people can read and write, sure. But don't confuse the tools (computers) with the results (economic productivity).
In the US, coffee-makers are low-payed jobs with no benefits -- as opposed to omputing and IT, which are good jobs. So your first analogy doesn't apply.
And on the second point, the field of gender HCI has shown that there tend to be differences in how men and women use computer programs. Yes, these are contextual and more likely to be due to societal norms, social pressures, and encouragement with technology than any innate gender difference. Still, they're real. And when software is constructed by almost-all-male teams, those preferred usages get embedded in it.
And when software is constructed by almost-all-male teams, those preferred usages get embedded in it.
Yet somehow, men successfully make software used by women. For example, Facebook, Zynga, Polyvore (or Bingo Card Creator, if you want to ask an approachable man how he does it).
Of course, if we follow your logic, it's actually a good thing if app developers at (for example) Bloomberg are mostly male. After all, trading desks are also mostly male, so it would be bad if female preferred usages were embedded into market research software, right? And it's also irrelevant for any part of IT where the HCI doesn't matter much (e.g. data analysis, systems, CRUD apps with a captive audience).
At best, your second point applies only narrowly to UI designers.
I don't see people trying to get more women into garbage collection
That is the dirty little secret of feminism. It's not and never was about "equality". It's about cherry-picking the best jobs - by means other than open competition.
Gaming is an interesting area, as it's shifting away from being male dominated. The number of female gamers has increased rapidly in the last few years, which may well result in more females being interested in the development side of it.
I was at a conference where a developer from India said that this is much less of an issue there; that the ratio of female/male developers is much more even. I thought that was pretty interesting - can anybody from (or with experience in) India comment on that?
When I was choosing what degree to do at university I didn't even consider computer science because I hadn't been exposed to computer science education before that so I didn't know what it was like and that I might be interested in it. I went to an all-girls school so it was probably assumed that girls would have no interest in it, in the same way that I wasn't offered courses in other typically male-oriented subjects like woodworking, mechanics etc. It wasn't until I took a computer science module as part of my business degree that I developed an interest in it and decided to do a masters in it.
So for me, the main reason I didn't study it at undergraduate level is that I simply wasn't exposed to it enough during my formative years to develop an interest in it, not through any perceived mathematical difficulty or that it is sometimes seen as a solitary activity.
My sister started out in the same Computing program that I am currently in, she managed around half a year until she switched to a law program.
She was doing quite well, better than most she was told when she left.
She left saying that computing was boring for girls, she had no outside interest in the subject and struggle to get into the right frame of mind for computing.
Look at this, computing is boring for girls. Her words not mine, if you look into the social stigma behind computing studies. I get called a nerd or a geek when people find out about my degree, it is even less cool for most girls to get into the subject. I honestly think there is a much stronger social side, where woman and young girls just do not want to get into this field.
If a guy you knew dropped out of CS (about 10-15% of them do in the first year) saying it was boring, would you be saying that computing is boring for guys ?
It seems hard to argue that there's a social stigma associated with computing that doesn't exist with IT, given that most people outside the field generally don't know the difference. So would you explain the difference in take up between the two fields ?
>To get onto a good Computer Science degree you generally need to have a strong grade at A-Level Maths (which students study between the ages of 16-18)
I stopped maths at 16, I hated it. I did CompSci at uni. About a third of unis in the UK have stopped requiring maths A level for compsci courses. They tend to be less 'pure' compsci courses and more generalised programming/IT/'making-stuff-with-computers' degrees.
I did do a Computing A-level though, which is quite rare. It was better-taught and more educational than a lot of my degree. And it was free. Goddammit.
Graduates from higher-ranking universities are much more likely to get tech jobs (we're talking 2-3x more likely), so the top universities (which require maths) are supplying a disproportionately large number of the software developers.
>Graduates from higher-ranking universities are much more likely to get tech jobs (we're talking 2-3x more likely)
Sweet. Apparently having arsed around at a non 'top' university and still having got a tech job means I am in a statistically small cohort of awesomeness.
One of the reasons may be, that men always help women with their computers. They don't need to clean it off spyware, reinstall windows or anything, because their IT friend will do it for them. So they don't need to explore how anything works, it's just a stupid black box for them. Why would they go and study Computer Science? They probably don't know what it is about.
I got into computers thanks to my little brother - I didn't want to admit that he knows something better than me. So I tried to fix it myself. Somehow, while searching for sites about how to fix this and that, I found some discussions on how Windows sux. Found Linux. Found out about programming...
I wonder how we could gauge how much of this apparent "predestination" is due to the innate differences between men and women and how much is simply a consequence of the way our society works. Most people will paint a newborn girl room pink and a boy room blue.
I don't think we should ignore or even try to dim the differences between men and women (diversity is a chance), but maybe society should give more room to children when it comes to choose what they want to become, and not brainwash them since early childhood that GI Joes are for boys and baby dolls are for girls.
When I was finishing up my A-levels and deciding what to study at degree level, the standard advice was that if you thought you might one day want to work with computers, to not take a computing degree (because at the time they were regarded as lower-quality than more traditional subjects), but to take something like maths instead. I don't know if that advice continues to be given, and I can't think of an obvious reason why women would pay more attention to it than men, but maybe someone else can?
I think you pick up on an interesting point - the focus on Computer Science qualifications above GCSE level. The drop-offs the article points to are between A-Levels and degrees and, to a lesser extent, between GCSEs and A-Levels. But those drop-offs can only be said to explain the gender disparity among professional developers if you accept that the vast majority of software developers working professionally today studied Computer Science at degree level. I'm not sure that's true, and I'm equally unsure that it should be true.
Given that there's a software developer shortage overall and that software development jobs don't tend to require CS degrees, wouldn't it be more prudent to make the professional end more attractive rather than concentrating on outreach for degree programmes?
Certainly among graduate employers CS degrees are the dominant source of developers (although you do get a number of Maths/Physics/Engineers as well). Unfortunately I don't think there's any good data on it. I wrote to the minister for universities a few weeks back trying to persuade him that HESA should be collecting this data, but I haven't heard back.
The problem for companies taking people without programming experience is that it's very high-risk. If you hire someone and after training find they can't program it's very hard to fire them.
I can't understand why we can't just go with
"Women just aren't interested in Programming" and leave it at that.
I never considered going into fashion or nursing or anything other remotely female dominated profession, because they just weren't interesting to me, and no amount of PR would have changed that.
The problem is that some women are interested in programming, but are discouraged by the education process, which is as male-dominated as the field itself. I know several guys who are in fashion, nursing and other female-dominated fields, but they have never been made to feel ostracized and alienated to the extent that budding female programmers are.
Maybe there is some innate difference, but with a wide variety of societal factors in play I think we're probably on safer ground eliminating them from the equation before we declare that women are somehow less likely to have technical aptitude by nature.
A lot of people have said that our brains are wired differently. I highly recommend Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine, it's looking into exactly those claims:
The only technical fields I can think of with significantly higher ratios are either a) softer (biology), or b) have a teaching track which attracts women (math teacher).
When I was in grad school, the math major had lots of women. The vast majority were education minors. The undergrads taking grad courses (note: every serious math major does this) were mostly men.
