Posted on 06/18/2008 3:50:43 PM PDT by shrinkermd
Walk the halls of the computer science buildings on college campuses across the United States and you'll notice a peculiar thing: there are very few women. At a time when women are swelling enrollments in many other university departments, computer science is conspicuous for its lack of female students.
Worse, percentages of female bachelor degrees earned in computer science are falling-down to 25 percent in 2004, the latest available figures, from a high of 37 percent in 1984. And all this is occurring at a time when National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to encourage women in the computer sciences -- about $20 million annually -- has never been higher.
Comparisons with other disciplines bring the trend in computer science into stark relief: Nearly all other scientific fields have seen a marked increase over the past 40 years in the percentage of bachelor degrees awarded to women, according to NSF data. For example, in 2004 the percentage of bachelor degrees awarded to women was about 45 percent in math; 42 percent in physical sciences, as well as in earth, atmospheric and oceanographic sciences. In all sciences combined, women earned 58 percent of bachelor degrees in 2004, compared to 43 percent in 1966.
(Excerpt) Read more at minnpost.com ...
Self-ping.
Why spend four tough years getting a comp sci degree when you will subsequently spend your career sweating out whether you job will get outsourced to Botswana some day?
My colleagues who graduated here with a Computer Science undergraduate degree within the last two years all had multiple job offers each, with salaries of no less than $60,000. Several are now making well over $70,000 two years after graduation.
The president of Harvard got fired for discussing possible reasons for fewer women being in some scientific fields. Some subjects are taboo subjects, and this is one of them. There is no explanation that will pass through the political correctness filter; no explanation that will satisfy the grievance lobbies which are allegedly so concerned about these types of subjects. As long as everyone has the opportunity to major in their fields of interest in college, and has opportunities in the job market in their chosen fields, the under-representation of certain groups in certain fields of endeavor should not be of concern.
For starters, the job outsourcing is nowhere nearly as bad as you may believe. And, seriously, no degree will guarantee lifetime employment. You must continue growing, learning, and adapting...such is life in a global society.
That said, with the presently charged political atmosphere and the high probability of soaking the "wealthy" (unfortunately, productive Computer Science graduates making $60K+ annually are "wealthy" according to the U.S. government)...I can understand why folks would only chase the light, easy majors.
I run a series of computer labs at a university(about 600 systems total) and we only have two women out of a staff of about 14 in the IT department that supports the labs. However, most of the graphics and web designers in our building and on campus are women. Go figure.
As someone who works in the God-forsaken field of computing, might I suggest that women possibly just have better opportunities in other fields that provide better pay, better working conditions, and more job security?
My wife's son-in-law graduated in comp science one year ago. He was deluged with offers. He took one, tired of it (too far from his kin and friends) despite the good working conditions, and quit. The first firm he interviewed for in the city he wanted to work in hired him the same day. And asked him to tell his comp science friends to come in for interviews. I would say that if you're good at comp science, you have an excellent chance of getting a good job.
I got my BSc Computer Science in 1997 and there weren't many women even back then. As for your above statement much of that is true and some isn't. BMC Software had a huge campus in Houston and within 2 years it vanished as they moved shop over to India. I on the other hand remained in the energy industry where software is very proprietary and usually used for in-house research and make a nice 6 figure salary.
Commercial software development is the most likely to get off-shored/outsourced.
The women don't want to move to India to find work.
I would say that it’s rare to find an American woman in IT, must of the women you’ll find in IT are Indian.
*
How about: no good prospect of finding an IT job in the US.
Why bother? The jobs are being offshored to India. Long way to move for a job that is run by a stateside company.
so what... who cares why??? there's no quota.
Does it really matter? Nobody is stopping women from pursuing computer science degrees. Maybe men and women have different interests.
Lets face it, chick are not attracted to a field dominated by overweight, pimple faces, living in their mothers basement, techno dweebs. That aside, its a boring subject that few [other than the above mentioned techno dweebs] are interested in.
I don't see anyone complaining about the disproportionately hight numbers of women enrolled in psychology programs. These people need to get over them selves and just accept the fact that some fields attract more men, and others more women.
“She blinded me with Science!”
I care! Used to be when I went to software conferences there were at least some women around. Granted, most were rather plain and over the years, more likely to be Asian of some sort.
Now when you go to the vender parties in the evening, few of the few women at the conference even attend. It’s like a sausage factory!
Bah! Bring on the techie chicks!
Have there been any studies done concerning why it is that 90+% of nurses are women? Is this a problem in that field?
Have there been studies done regarding why the majority of players in the NBA are black?
Have there been studies done regarding why the majority of teachers in elementary school are women, but that the ratio of men to women is much more even in middle school and high school teaching? And does this represent a problem?
Why are so many secretaries women?
Why are so many of the hired help in retail stores women?
Why are so many of the hired help in fast food places teenagers or young adults?
The point is, any area studied will show that certain groups are under-represented if you are looking for that.
The cool logic of a computer cares not what your gender is, the color of your skin, your bank, or your rank. It cares not at all.
They are going into nursing. Guarenteed 65k to start and it wont be outsourced soon
I know many women in the field, the good ones are irreplaceable (like me). The bad ones are usually in management and have no idea what they are doing (but then I find that with male managers also). Just get out of my way and let me do my job. By the way my degree is in Child Developement, and some of the best people I have worked with do not have a degree or got their experience in the military.
Got to run or I could go on and on.
I Dont have a degree. And I make more than $90,000. Some of the worst people in my IT department have degrees. Degrees dont impress me.
I’d be willing to bet that real-world experience is at least partly responsible for this down trend. Computer Science is not pretty. You have to have a special kind of mind to get into the field AND be any good at it. A lot of people got into the field back in the mid-late nineties or so who had no business getting into that field, but who did so because that was where the big money was supposed to be. Once the free-for-all ended, and the IT world got more competitive, a lot of the people who should never have been in IT started leaving the field. Chances are, a hefty portion of this group was women, and those women have been spreading the word that the computer world isn’t as glamorous as Hollywood makes it out to be.
What are the degrees in, and from what schools? What courses did they take, who taught them, and what kind of grades did they get?
I agree, a degree by itself is only impressive combined with project and internship experience. For example, a classmate developed a Pocket PC instant messaging application combined with GPS tracking capability for his senior thesis, as an example. I myself interned at a large financial institution where we worked with IBM content management software and managed Lotus Domino servers.
Well I am, and I'm not!
They might explain both fewer men and women (to the extent, limited that they are true) were taking Computer Science courses. But that wasn't the point of this post.
My sense is that men's and women's brains work differently, and that, on statistical average, so-called "Computer Science", and before that mathematics and physics, are disciplines that men do better. By that I mean, of the five or ten percent of the population with the raw talent and temperment well suited for such work, most are men.
The average over the entire population is not relevent here; most people wouldn't do well at (nor be particularly interested in) such work regardless of their gender, and if the men in that bulk of the population were actually less suited for computer science jobs than the women, it wouldn't really matter in determining the makeup of those who are suited for such jobs.
I've hired and fired men and women in Computer Science jobs, and have gone out of my way to encourage women. The best manager I've worked for was a woman. Women have certain advantages, as a statistical group, over men, in such management jobs. I've had a few good women programmers working for me; but all the outstanding programmers that I've known, and the lopsided majority of all programmers I've known, were men.
Consider for example the Linux kernel mailing list, on which I am active. An incredible variety of people from around the world are active on that list, developing the Linux kernel. In any given quarter, a couple of thousand people will submit Linux kernel changes to that list that are accepted into the next version of the Linux kernel.
I can't tell the gender of all Linux kernel contributors; some names can be either male or female, and I am not familiar with the naming conventions of some cultures. But of the names I can tell, it runs over 99% male. Most of us on that list have never seen each other; we don't know what the others look like, nor sometimes even where in the world they are working from. It is the closest thing to an unbiased meritocracy I've seen.
Yes, men's and women's minds tend to think differently.
But, could you tell me what you mean by the above phrase? I couldn't make sense of it.
I was multitasking, and I don’t know what I was thinking.
Just completed a “train-em quick” entry level IT program. In fact, I graduate tomorrow. Zero to MCSA in 6 months. First in my class to do so, even before the techie whiz whippersnappers who sat behind me. Should be an MCSE before the end of the year.
When I would go to conferences and shows, most of the women were booth babes.
And now, even the booth babes aren't that attractive!
The Babes Of Computex 2008, Day 1
More Booth Babes Of Computex 2008
They were pretty hot when I used to go, mainly recruited from the area colleges. I talked to one on the way back once, and it’s apparently a hard job. Imagine standing in 4” heels for 12 hours straight with a smile on your face, and do that for a week straight.
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