Posted on 12/18/2005 7:00:11 AM PST by A. Pole
This statement would lead one to assume that women used to go into CS in greater numbers. I was an engineering major in the 70's (which would have been the time when today's tenured professors and department chairs were students). The engineering male/female ratio was 20/1. There were NO women in my computer classes, that I recall
The quota queens are firm in the belief that a horse lead to the water CAN be forced to drink.
I've worked with aeronautical engineers my whole career. They will often send me specs that are rife with errors, omissions, ambiguities and contradictions. They expect that the "reader" will auto-correct their "typos", and mistakes, properly interpret their ambiguities, and understand what they really meant.
I have never seen a written specification work product that does not have lots of demonstrable errors in it. And few managers think that it is worthwhile to put out another revision to correct "insignificant" errors that may be in the document. I can understand why, at some point, you fix one error, and somehow introduce two others in the usual document production process.
Computers do not have auto-correcting processors, or any tolerance for misstatement. Inadvertently tell them to divide by zero, and they attempt to do same, trapping out in the process. S/W engineers have to anticipate "misunderstandings", and dead-end alleys, and insure that their work product (code) does not contain any. That is much more exacting, I think.
I've not worked with mathematicians for the most part, but from my college days, lots of things were supposed to be "intuitively obvious". Computers lack intuition at this time, so the S/W engineer has to find a way to express that to a simple machine.
Can't they make up the difference by being over half of the grads in, say, business administration?
Seems to me that there's more money in management than extreme geeking. You'll note that Bill Gates doesn't write his own code.
So I say again, why do we care about gender parity in any given field? Can't we let the numbers fall where they may?
That's why spec writing is an iterative process. I have never seen a spec written right the first time and doubt I ever will. That being said, even with "perfect" specs, many errors slip through Code and Unit Test and don't get found till FQT or later. While software engineers try to minimize errors, they usually don't always succeed to the degree they should. We've all seen the software reliability curves that show the vast majority of errors are found quickly, but a few stubborn ones may linger for months, even years before they are discovered. Very few large programs survive contact with reality.
Here's a good rule of thumb. Find out the stats for the mean/variance of errors found per KSLOC in your company. If a software makes it through testing with significantly fewer errors than that, then someone isn't doing their job (e.g., it hasn't been tested well enough).
I agree. It's not like women aren't going into challenging fields like law and medicine where men used to dominate. It's just that THIS field bores them to tears, like the girls in the article who don't rebuild computers from scratch or understand all thetechnical jargon. I don't want/need to know how to change my own oil, either.
I am teaching both my daughters to do some coding. I think coding will be the 'typing' of the near future - a very valueable skill that you used to list on your resume but is now all-but-assumed...
What exactly do you mean by "coding?" Are you actually teaching them a programming language? If so, what?
I am still working on pulling a few things together. They played with Logo, had some fun, but grew tired of it. I was gonna go Java, some decent stuff out there for teaching kids.
Just ran across this a while ago, still researching - http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/ - figured I would play with it over a brief christmas break. my break is over and I didn't get to it...
Right now I am teaching some basic concepts without a language - looping, decision making, very basic stuff.
Hey! Don't blame me in years to come!
My 9 year old daughter has already become quite proficient at the GameCube she just got for Christmas (Something only her dad would have bought her :-)
I'm hoping I can raise her to be a geek like her dad!
No worries... Surely we can come up with a “Title 9” solution to the lack of women in technical fields. This will drive down the number of men until there is parity, and Viola! Problem solved!
Maybe some day the principles of programming -- sequence, looping, Boolean operations -- may be a given, but I doubt fluency in a particular language will be assumed among the general populace.
Nevertheless, programming is a good way to teach logical discipline, a skill that serves well across other fields of endeavor.
Really? Typing was done when the actual text/speech was created by someone else. What do you mean by "coding"? The same thing that compilers do? Do you want your daugthers to become living compilers?
And so will be advanced calculus ("counting"), and surgery("cutting"), and dentistry ("boring")
Well there will always be teeth
I can safely say I know the reason for the gender gap. This article is generally filled with useless tripe about discrimination and blah blah, typical media cluelessness. Only on page 3 does it begin to grasp the truth of the matter, but then strangely ignores it:
Those who were driven out were not the worst students, but those who felt more marginal, Roberts argues. They could have been men or women, but studies have shown that women generally have less previous computing experience and less single-minded passion for technology.
In case you missed that, it was: women generally have less previous computing experience and less single-minded passion for technology.
There you go. Generally if you have less previous computer experience you are either a) not really interested in computers at all, or b) you just use them to play games, download music and instant message your friends. Either way you are at a disadvantage when it comes to computer science at higher education level than someone who say wants to control the machines and taught themselves the basics of how they work and some basic programming. The difference is motivation. This goes for male or female, but it seems to be overwhelmingly males who get interested in how computers work and spend a lot of free time learning about it before going to college or uni.
When I was taking computer science at university I knew of other people who were only taking the subject because they thought it would lead to a job with lots of money in (which is far from necessarily true anyway - economics or law is a safer bet). They had no real motivation for the subject, or experience and so many of them dropped out. You can't really do well in a computer science course if a) you have to learn programming and b) you aren't interested in honing programming in your free time (yes I know programming isn't all of computer science, but what can you seriously say about a 3rd year computer scientist who doesn't know what a class is? Let alone the university that allowed them to reach the 3rd year). In my opinion the university should not have allowed anyone in who didn't have previous experience, however basic. There should have been an entry exam. Lack of knowledge shows lack of motivation as computer science is a subject in which you can easily have taught yourself the basics in your free time.
I found my course was dumbed down a lot to cater for people who had very little idea what was going on. Gave me a lot of free time though, although I wasted it all in front a computer.
Girls and computers aren't just a good fit. The type of skills needed to program are man's skills.
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