Women good, men bad.
These disciplines require mastery, at least to a certain level. Yes, computers help a great deal, and in engineering, there are companies that specialize in doing a lot of the low-level "grunt" work.
But STEM stands in stark contrast to rest of the made-up world of academia. Its demands on the mind are rigorous, and there are those who can't cut it. That sticks in the craw of these elites.
Too bad for them.
Harvey Mudd? As in Harcort Fenton Mudd? From Star Trek?
FWIW, in 1987 my CS-101 class at SUNY Stony Brook had hundreds of students, and just a handful were female. This isn't anything new.
Mark
I don't think I'd have gotten out of third grade if I put that on a paper.
This was tried back in the mid-nineties during the dotcom boom. I went to engineering school back then and there was a big push to get young women interested in engineering at the high school level. They did a good job herding the gals into the engineering schools, but they hit what’s called “The Physics Barrier” and dropped out into other kinder, gentler degree programs.
Isn’t it all about “choice” for women? It looks like they are not choosing this career path. No harm, no foul, I say.
The first computer programmer was a lady.
Ada Lovelace didn’t require affirmative action: why should her heirs?
Black and Gold grouping sounds very familiar.
A and B Sections
College and Career Tracks
Robin and Bluebird Study Groups
It all amounts to the same thing.
“Giving” it to them?
Shouldn’t they work for it like everyone else?
Real sciences have no need for affirmative action
Known as CS 5, the course focused on hard-core programming, appealing to a particular kind of student — young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. This only reinforced the women’s sense that computer science was for geeky know-it-alls.
The idea that someone will be able to succeed as a programmer without enjoying programming for its own sake is patently absurd.
It's not that any professional programmer must be able to handle "hard-core" programming classes, any effective programmer must relish this sort of material. It's part and parcel of being a programmer.
“If we’re not getting more women to be part of that, it’s just nuts,” Dr. Klawe said.
QED
I’m sure the article could have been written the exact opposite way. Women dominate X field and Y field. Men are losing ground.
Of course that must be okay, since you never hear of such things! But since more women graduate college now, and men do dominate certain professions, it only stands to reason that there are female dominated professions. Women are spoiled in this country. It would be nice to see somebody say it. Women can do what they want to do. They can work and be at par with men. Or they can stay home and raise a family. All the while the popular culture reinforces how special women are. Is it asking too much for society to acknowledge how lucky the modern woman is?
Oddly enough, 25-ish years ago when I worked in an IT dept of 300+ people, the majority of programmers & analysts were women. At the same time, at the area universities it was a pretty even split between men and women in the classes.
I wonder what changed. (Maybe I should click?)
Why would a woman want to enter a STEM field when she can make more money for less work in traditionally women-dominated fields such as education and nursing?
i fail to see the point in convincing peopel to go into fields for which they have no interest nor inclination - what ever their grnder. isn’t it far better to encourage people to do what thet want to do?
“Most of the female students were unwilling to go on in computer science because of the stereotypes they had grown up with,”
Couldn’t be that, in general, a female’s brain “wiring” is not conducive to being attracted to the thought process that meshes well with computer programming? No?
Oh, wait! I get it! Computers were designed by males, so the way they operate is inherently “sexist”!
My own experience with women in the computer Sci field has been very good. Most of them were superior programmers and had good critical reasoning at problem analysis.
On the other hand in College I would say that my class in 1982 started out around 50% women and ended up around 10% by graduation. I would say that the number one reason for that decline was the number of hours required to do the required work and quite frankly Computer Lab time was difficult to get at times and that required a very flexible schedule including a few all-nighters.
Social time suffered or was non-existant earning CS majors the title of geeks.
Where are the articles decrying the lack of men in early education???