Computer science is now the top major for women at Stanford University
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
According to the article "It was unclear if Stanford is the only major U.S. university where computer science is the top major for female students."
That link was the top hit for https://www.google.com/search?q=mit+women+enrollment
This is a pretty sad thing to see in something purporting to be journalism. I can't blame the really writer though. They probably only had 30 minutes to get something out the door to drive their view count...
A few minutes of online research (or perhaps an hour(s) of calls to registrars) would have resolved that. Then she could have made a concrete informative statement like "[?All] of the top 10 ranked schools (via US News and World Report) have seen a significant increase in female computer science majors." and/or "MIT & [...] also reported that CS is the most popular major for women."
The flip side is, these are upperclassmen, which I understand to mean they probably have been taking CS classes for some time already at Stanford. Most of these factors would have been encountered already if they are indeed present at all, which is cheering in its own way.
[1] http://www.academia.edu/5317313/STEM_Switching_Examining_Dep...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-business/11182833/Ho...
[3] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
If I'm correct, then the very same media outlets lamenting the lack of women in CS are actually partly to blame for it for their ongoing denigration and belittling of those already in the field. For example, someone in this thread cited an NPR article titled "When Women Stopped Coding." Does "coding" sound like a prestigious job activity to you? How many news articles have you seen lately that casually refer to psychiatrists or psychologists as "shrinks," and how many have you seen that refer to us as "coders," "geeks," or "nerds?"
I have absolutely no problem with "Coder". At the risk of sounding grand and dandy, I think people realize the impact Code has on their lives, and being called a coder makes me very happy.
I agree with your apprehension over Geek & Nerd, though, it's a badge of honor for you and me but maybe not within wider society. But still, which media outlets?
Oh BTW: Interesting point about "prestige" affecting womens' choices in profession. I did not give that angle much thought, I'll talk to some of my female colleagues to verify.
Edit: Certainty this isn't the only reason to choose another career besides software, I just thought I'd respond to prestige as a particular reason.
The media by and large does not care about programmers, only insofar as there is overlap with Internet entrepreneurs.
Or it's like referring to a writer as a "writer".
Of relevance is the following snippet from http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
"Does the staggering wealth of particular engineers and programmers mean that there is any chance for nerds to rise socially?
Stammbach worked with a colony of longtailed macaques. In the paper cited above, the running header is "Responses to Specially Skilled Java Monkeys." Stammbach took the lowest-ranking macaque out of the society and taught him to operate a complex machine and obtain food. When the nerd monkey was reintroduced to the society, the higher ranking macaques stopped kicking him out of the way long enough for him to complete operation of the machine and obtain food for the community. I.e., society cooperated to create the conditions under which the nerd could toil for them. However, the monkey who acquired these special skills and provided for the society did not achieve any rise in his dominance status."
Phil Greenspun's title for the above was "Java Monkeys."
(I personally don't have an opinion about the status of programmers relative to other professionals and how it affects women, so just commenting on your remark.)
Only a matter of time. Somebody should update the jargon file.
In my old University, women were common in the first year of Comp Sci, as it was the easiest department to gain entry to for them as females because of quotas or whatever positive discrimination is called.
However in the second year, they would typically transfer out to another department they were more keen on, but probably wouldn't have won a place at initially.
"By 2010, one in four new jobs will be “technically-oriented,” or involving computers. However, women still lag far behind in earning computer technology degrees and working in computer technology-related professions. High school girls represent only 17 percent of computer science AP test takers and college-educated women earn only 27 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer science (down from 37 percent in 1984) and 16.3 percent of doctorate degrees in computer science. Overall, women comprise roughly 20 percent of IT professionals. (“Tech Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age,” American Association for University Women, 2000)" [1]
Barring the "down from 37 percent" part, it tells me that 17% of female high schoolers take AP computer science, but actually a higher percentage of women end up with a CS diploma. It's very thin connection but that does raise a question that affirmative action lets in more women.
[1] http://www.civilrights.org/equal-opportunity/fact-sheets/fac...
Stanford doesn't separate undergrad admissions by department. When I applied, the application didn't even ask what my intended major was. All Stanford undergrads start out as "undeclared", and many don't choose a major until sophomore year.
What's awesome is that women are now choosing CS more than any other major, and Stanford is providing them an environment where it's cool to do so. That's incredible.
There's been a significant change (at least from my perspective) in the awareness of inequitable treatment of women in tech in the last few years, and I'd like to think that's one of the contributing factors to this change.
If true, that means that the previous levels of entry into other subjects were (in part) due to students rejection of CS. If CS loses its repulsion factor then that brings everyone's metrics back to neutral and will make other problems clearer.
Much as I hate to wheel out the trite "everything is a market" trope, the more subjects like physics will have to work to improve the treatment of women in science (although my perception is that it's not as bad as tech)... and maybe (one day) the way science is run to make it a more appealing career.
I was a physics undergrad and chose to ditch science as a career at my first opportunity. A majority of the people who stayed on to do an MSc or PhD did so only because it would buy them a well payed role at a bank, or PWC, or Anderson (sorry, "Accenture"). It's a shitty career, fighting for funding or tenure, full of victorian-era bullshit.
The sooner physics (for one) cleans house the better.
Notice the arbitary abstraction of, eg
Bio Sciences Human Biology
1955 1. History 2. Economics 3. Psychology 4. Political Science 5. Bio Sciences
1965 1. History 2. Political Science 3. English 4. Psychology 5. Economics
1975 1. Psychology 2. Bio Sciences 3. Economics 4. History 5. English
1985 1. Economics 2. Human Biology 3. Bio Sciences 4. Electrical Engr 5. English
1995 1. Bio Sciences 2. Human Biology 3. Economics 4. Psychology 5. English
and now we look at 2010 (from quora)
Biological Sciences (1.32%) but Human Biology (12.58%) Biology (5.74%)
=~20% of Standford majors in 2010 are "biology majors" in plain language usage.
Based on data on Bachelor's Degrees conferred in the 2009-2010 school year[1], the top majors are:
Human Biology (12.58%)
Economics (8.10%)
International Relations (6.20%)
Biology (5.74%)
Computer Science (4.94%)
Engineering (4.71%)
Psychology (4.54%)
Political Science (4.25%)
English (3.96%)
History (3.62%)
Management Science and Engineering (3.39%)
Mechanical Engineering (3.10%)
Science, Technology, and Society (2.30%)
Communication (2.18%)
Electrical Engineering (2.07%)
Mathematics (2.01%)
Earth Systems (1.84%)
Physics (1.84%)
Sociology (1.49%)
Biological Sciences (1.32%)*I graduated from UVA In '99 and the biggest majors by far were psychology, sociology, history and economics, possibly in that order, but definitely each having ~500 graduates (out of a class of perhaps 2800-3000). I think the entire engineering school only graduated about 300-400 people each year (at that time).
The current enrollment seems to match Stanford's stats, interestingly: http://www.seas.virginia.edu/about/facts/
What we're seeing is that female students at Stanford are less concentrated on a single major than the male ones. As a result, their top pick isn't as high as the male top pick. I'd guess that the distribution of female majors is higher entropy than the male one.
Simpson's paradox would be if there was some second confounding variable that corelated to gender which was causing these results. There might be, but I'm not seeing it.
Men do face discrimination in nursing. However, men are still paid more on average than female nurses[1]. Make of that what you will. The thing I find most striking is that before the 20th century, most nurses were men and in the early days of computing there was a much higher number of women in the field.
[1] http://medcitynews.com/2015/03/male-nurses-earn-maybe-gender...
https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/1l1k75/any_male_nu...
http://www.jacksonvilleu.com/resources/career/men-in-nursing...
There is a gender gap even within specific nursing professions but it's not nearly as extreme as that.
Only ~10% of registered nurses in the United States are men[1].
> According to the Census Bureau, men made up about 9 percent of registered nurses in 2011, roughly a three-fold increase from 1970.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/cb13-32_men_in_...
Computing and IT started to come of age during the post WW2 boom so there would have been a lot of women with the math background to make programming and working with computers somewhat of a logical next step in ones career.
Coincidentally, these woman who had math backgrounds were also some of the fist to have their jobs automated out of existence (the woman who calculates someone's insurance premium is replaced with a box of punch cards).
Just speculating but it wouldn't be a stretch to see how when choosing between going home or switching careers the woman who didn't become the stereotypical 50s-60s housewives as their jobs were automated found new jobs writing punch cards (programming) and operating computers.
(i'm in a hurry, probably lots of grammar mistakes in that)
Correct, that was the case with a number of the roles. Those roles were sort of like the modern day CRUD development and things that (mostly) get automated away.
However, Grace Hopper[1], Betty Holberton[2], Frances Spence[3], along with around a half dozen of the original programmers of the ENIAC[4] would disagree that they were only filling a secretary like position.
In reference to my previous comment, I mostly found it surprising that these pioneers didn't lead to more women pursuing CS early on. I suppose it has more to do with the cultural trends that came after the war as you said yourself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Holberton
I suggest you reflect on this and what people say and mean when they talk about topics relating to privilege, power, gender, race, wealth, patriarchy, etc., and you'll get it, too.
Pick any subject where men are under-represented and you can find, if you look for it, groups who are (rightly) trying to fix it.
That still seems exceptionally low. Posted this upthread but in 2010 20% of the student body was in Biology (once topical sub-specialties were aggregated).
20% of ~3500 would be closer to `700, which is 3.3x the number of declared comp sci students.
Or maybe my math is wrong? I'm more interested in the actual knowledge being put in and attention being paid out than a critique of the degree naming conventions.
A proper CS degree teaches you how to think, how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities.
What separates CS from other degrees is that it does filter out those without the horsepower or fortitude on both the quant side (algorithms) and the creative side (systems, architecture).
That means, that even if the SV bubble crashes, CS majors are the best equipped to handle whatever career is hot next - any hiring manager at Goldman, McKinsey, or F500 company X will tell you the same.
Any degree that claims it teaches you how to think should ring the snake-oil alarm.
> how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities
So how do they teach that? Or does that just mean they got a few group projects, where smart people bump into each other but don't really learn to solve problems in a team?
Unis tend to suck at teaching teamwork. Though they tend to be pretty good at teaching algorithms and systems (which are good to know, and don't go out of date too quickly).
The worst course I took in my CS department was the algorithms and data structures course. Didn't write a line of code. Wrote a ton of induction proofs. Learned a lot of esoteric algorithms that have very good big O profiles, but suck bogwater because of cache coherency when they are implemented on non-imaginary hardware, or have high constant factors that got hand-waved away. I'd sign up for that course in a hot second, if it covered the same material, but instead of scrawling on a chalkboard, it was structured around writing the same algorithms in C, segfaults and all. I don't think most CS majors could hack that kind of course, however.
Algorithms was all about searching, sorting, and heaps, and the main project was implementing several different sort algorithms in C or C++ and comparing their best / worst case performance. Also pretty easy, and very useful.
Advanced algorithms sucked balls. 100% theory and proofs, no implementation. Instructor was awful Didn't get anything useful out of it. All the other students were cheating on the homework together, since all the problems were right out of the textbook and somebody had the solutions manual. Still got an A but it was awful and I got nothing useful out of it.
The techniques I learned there are all out of date or things I could have learned in the first few months on the job. While the techniques I learned in algorithms and data structures (and other theoretical classes like discrete math and automata) are pretty much still state of the art and have proved useful time and again (and I definitely wouldn't have picked most of them up after a few months on the job).
I do wonder to what student material you've been exposed to when you claim most CS majors could not attend a basic practical programming course in C.
This is quite a strong claim. I also find the terminology "filters out" troubling. I thought universities were fundamentally there to teach people and not just sieve them. Well, personally my physics department was operated like a sieve but that simply is not a rational way to run an educational facility. It's just macho bullshit ("We're so tough...").
"That means, that even if the SV bubble crashes, CS majors are the best equipped to handle whatever career is hot next.."
I would claim when changing to a new field, any university major that requires rigorous thinking and understanding of math based systems gives that advantage.
So is this progress or Stanford appearing progressive? There is no way to tell.
Stanford accepts 50% women and more of those women are picking to become CS majors after they get in, when they didn't just a few years ago. This is actually progress.
I've noticed very few of these articles look at the recent past ('80s) when women were a significant percentage of programmers. I'm too young but I have the feeling working conditions were much better back then.
You mean working conditions for programmers?
From talking to people who worked in computing back then (like my grandfather), it seems like we have it better today. Of course that's only anecdotal, and my perception of today is as coloured as my choice of people to talk to.
Would be interesting to see a more formal study.
http://www.tenement.org/encyclopedia/housing_rent.htm
Turns out, it's actually pretty accurate. But food was much more expensive, sucking up maybe ten days of income (and that's 100% groceries, which is rare enough these days, I suppose). Clothing, though, that's where you see the real change. Cheaper these days in non-inflation adjusted dollars than it was in the 1890's, in you can believe it (maybe I buy fewer articles of clothing than most people, but likely not less clothing than people in 1890).
Source: my rent is about 2 weeks of pay (which sucks and doesn't feel very sustainable, mind you)
Schools often shape their admissions - good that this isn't one of those cases.
[1] http://documents.library.nsf.gov/edocs/HD6060-.A84-2008-PDF-...
Personally I think it's BS for people to tell you to "follow your passion" and also am critical of the "we need people who are passionate about x". Most people work as a way to make a living.
The first thing that came to my mind, is that many girls that are interested in this stuff may now feel more comfortable than ever to enroll in Computer Science, as the issue of sexism is being tackled and talked about a lot.
In addition to money, how flexible are the McKinsey or Goldman jobs with having and raising children?
Some people claim that to be a programmer you need to have a certain personality or hobbies, and this is wrong.
But nerd elitism is also a reaction to having been excluded, ridiculed and sometimes bullied. That doesn't make it right, but it also means that bashing nerds and nerd culture, as is all to common amongst progressives, is both unfair and counterproductive.
What I would like to see more people saying is that it's ok that many people in tech have certain hobbies or personality traits in common, but that a person doesn't have to have these things to work in tech.
I have no references to back this up, but I think it would make an interesting longitudinal study, or if you were somewhat cruel, a twin study: are children that spend most of their play time building with Legos or Kinex or erector sets significantly more likely to end up as engineers and computer programmers?
If comp sci. was still seen as a thing for nerds with skin issues that don't get a lot of money you can bet there would be no "diversity" thing going on.
There should be no such thing. Instead of trying to bend ethics I'd rather make sure any one, from any skin color, gender, place of birth, etc. can do anything they want. THAT would be diversity.
The truth is that today what you can do with your life depends a LOT more on your place of birth than your skin color or gender.
Do we say this kind of crap to Lawyers? Doctors? Engineers? (scratch the last one i'm sure we do say this kind of crap to them)
Why must programming be such a soul sucking life encompassing thing? It doesn't matter if you're a woman or man, this stupid mindset that somehow the only way to be a programmer is to be a stereotype needs to be launched into the sun and forevermore forgotten.
Just today I met a girl that was in her last year for aerospace engineering. She didn't look like any nerd you might think. She just looked normal. Great fun to talk to as well.
Maybe when us nerds stop thinking of ourselves as some sort of promised race of super humans we can move past some of this nonsense.
Least the doctors I have met all seemed to think of it as a job not a lifestyle.
It is that fundamental point I'm slightly annoyed with. Big firm law is also a bit of a clique, a lawyer friend of mine and the lawyers I know of all seem to love law, but aren't of this weird mindset that only the self chosen few are worthy of the endeavor.
As for workload, lawyers and doctors tend to be overworked and honestly that's really not okay for doctors, as it leads to dangerous mistakes. My cousin is a lawyer and she always seems to be working, but she's also great at what she does. Another cousin of mine is becoming a doctor and residency is quite a gauntlet for her to run. But those are other issues.
There isn't anything unique that bad code inflicts on your co-workers that isn't analogous to the problems faced by most people who have to deal with incompetent coworkers.
Yes, you can find other jobs where a mistake brings down the whole team, but it's rarely the kind of mistake that can persist in the codebase for years on end simply because there's no budget to refactor.
Now, you might point out that managers can, in fact, cause even more problems than that, but I don't think you'll find many people who want to work for a bad boss, either and I bet you or someone you know knows people who have left otherwise good jobs because of their boss.
Tomp said they think this way every time someone says "We need to encourage more women/people to study CS". This relates to the whole "the tech industry is sexist" non-sense some radical feminist spew out ... speaking of which, out of the following two which do you think is vital to address (psychologically) first?
- stop attributing the "promised race of super humans" self-perception
- stop attributing the "successful tech men are sexists" projection
Which is causing more strife than the other? Lookup 'github horvath', donglegate ... why even elevatorgate.
Looks like you're projecting your own ideas and complexes to what I said. Guess what - I look normal as well! But still, my interest in computing goes deeper than finishing class assignments and longer than 3 years.
Most lawyers and doctors don't build stuff. Those that do (do new medical research, or write new laws), I sincerely hope and expect that their knowledge and understanding of their profession goes way beyond an average coprofessional's.
(If it bothers you that salaries play a role in how people choose their majors, advocate for an economic system that allows people to pursue their ideal passions without financial worry, whether those passions are in computer science or poetry or "underwater basket weaving" or what have you. Until such a system is in place, though, it's only reasonable that people, in deciding how they'd like the rest of their life to play out, go where the opportunities are...)
Where were the "women in tech" back when computer programming was some "weird" hobby of the outcast nerds? What has always bothered me was that feminists have conveniently painted this lack of interest (prior to the financial incentives of current times) as some evil intent on the men. Sexist industry? Give me a fsck'ing break! All of their perceived sexism is in their own minds.
One would do well listening to actual female nerds than wannabe immitator-warriors. https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c
Programming was originally an exclusively female profession because it was seen as lowly-paid "women's work". Later it became a male profession.
But you're talking about the non-professional setting. Well, that started with the home computer revolution. There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.
Every time this comes up, someone points out that "programming" was mostly data entry at that time, and that there is a suspicious correlation between the decline in female programmers and the movement of data entry from programmers to administrators.
I can't seem to find hard data either way, though. So make of that what you will.
I just glanced at Wikipedia on this topic ... and, apart from the convenient mention of Ada Lovelace at the very beginning of both the articles[1] (makes you curious why they do this), history of programming is evidently a mostly -- no, nearly all -- male profession.
Just what kind of "programming" was it that the exclusively female professional partook on, whose profession was to later become a male profession (and what kind of "programming" are the male professionals partaking on)?
> There were few teenage girls programming at home because the means of doing so - home computers - were marketed almost exclusively to boys. Alas, parents seem to avoid buying boys 'girl toys' and vice-versa.
- Marketers will target whatever that can be easily influenced to make a purchase.
- 'girl toys' are neither superior nor inferior to 'boy toys,' ... and feminists are the last group of people to acknowledge this distinction. As a generalization, girls learn to manipulate people from a early age (hence playing with barbies)[2], much as boys learn to manipulate tools. Toys merely fulfill this instinctual desire of humans; they are not being enforced by the hypothetical patriarchal parents and society.
- Thus, it seems far more likely that despite parents'/peers' encouragement to play more with the tools (such as computers) "teenage girls" continued to opt to play with "girl toys" out of their own instinctual preference. Perhaps because they knew deep down that the real power lies in manipulating people and not computers.
[1] Two links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science
[2] Diana Davidson describing this in detail: https://youtu.be/mk_WaTdhyT0?t=1m16s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC#Programming
ENIAC started with an exclusively female group of six programmers.
This Cosmo article is from 1967: http://boingboing.net/2015/07/31/the-computer-girls-1967-c.h...
In a line sure to make heads explode, it quotes Grace Hopper explaining how programming is just like planning dinner.
It is just like planning dinner. Programming isn't magic and it's wankery to suggest otherwise.
Female programmers where just people who would rewire the computers do to arithmetic that the mathematicians "programmed". They did not write the algorithms nor did they know anything more than the basics of "this plug does this". their job was taking a work sheet and making the machine do what the work sheet instructed them to do. as computers automated this the female "programmers" where no longer needed to do this low skill job https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Two_wome...
Another example of females doing low skill work that seems technical are phone workers in the 50s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Telephon...
Due to modern programming jobs being simple maintenance work women are being pushed into the job to get them to lower the wages of male workers.
If you are a male who is a programmer or female with a husband who is a programmer you are cheering for lower wages
Programming as a field has historically two or three subcultures - the corporate, the academic (and finally, the personal).
The academic branch is where the new stuff has been imagined. The corporate branch is where the work that added value to society in form of financial income happened. Think of huge accounting machines, and extrapolate from that to modern computing. Taxes, census etc.
The corporate branch had several tasks that were labour intensive. Usually this labour intensive part was reserved for women (they are more keen on details on average or other such rationalization). Also, historically, women did not get paid as much as men so more labour for the same amount of money...
Well, anyway, the first computers were women (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer).
Women were also extensively hired as data entry clerks.
In the age of the mainframe, a typical division of labour was that the software designer wrote the program on paper with pencil, and then the data entry clerk encoded it into the computer (using punch cards or later terminals).
The integrated software designer / data entry thing probably originated in the universities and other research setings (i.e. Knuth typing his Tex from his notebook the the terminal at his Uni. and so on).
Admittedly this is mainly in a corporate environment, but most of the women I started with tended not to come back when they started their family. I think with more family friendly hours and policies such as remote and flex working this may also change.
To say that "they are only doing it for the cash" is unlikely, as from what I have seen that drive tends to run in men more so than women. cf: all the "web developers" in the first tech boom who did not know shit from clay and vanished as quickly as they came in the bust.
That's backed up by the data. There was an NPR piece [1] with graphs of what proportion of people taking various other degrees and Computer Science were women. They were increasing in lockstep until the 80s, but then after that CS just kept falling and falling, even (to my surprise) into the 2000s.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...
In a testable way?
I'm really interested to see which of diversity's claimed benefits hold up to scrutiny. Perfectly happy to see diversity as an end and not a means.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....
Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.
Note also that I'm not strongly endorsing this work - I'm just pointing out the strong desire to not publish a result against diversity.
A team where everyone speaks a different language is very diverse, but not effective, since there is no communication. One in which they at least share some common language which for all of them is a second language, not with full fluency, would be able to function, but likely not as efficiently as one in which everyone speaks the same language as their mother tongue.
And language can be just an analogy. Instead of language, imagine a cultural background of shared assumptions and experiences. A shared background can help avoid misunderstandings and speed up communication.
At the same time, it's clear that diversity can help in many ways, avoiding single-mindedness, for example. If everyone has the same concepts and background, they might miss something important.
For political reasons, people like to say that diversity is good, and it is indeed good in some ways. But that's far from the whole story.
It would be better to not use "diversity is good for business" as a slogan, when there are other more valid reasons to fix issues with inclusion where they exist.
I have no clue either. Some unique perspectives I bring: I favor rigid APIs over close team communication, I favor Bayesian statistics over frequentist, and I'm working on convincing folks that the JVM is actually a great platform to deploy code on. Are these technical matters something that a certain ethnic group (different from mine) is uniquely single minded about?
I've been the bringer of diversity for most of my career. And I can't think of a time when it's actually mattered.
The JVM is a fantastic platform to build for and run on. I know of nothing else that's so powerfully general purpose for typical server-side business work, with such a compelling ecosystem. Multiplatform support can be useful, though mainly for me it's the ability to develop from any platform, rather than deploy to. It seems to be widely undervalued -- I would describe it as popularly unfashionable right now. Yet I don't know of any platforms with such deep ecosystems and comparable technical merit. .NET comes close (and is arguably better designed in some ways, and has some neat features), but is Windows-focused and seems to lack the open source communities Java has.
Talking about this almost makes me want to start a list of "awesome things about Java that are without parallel in other platforms".
I've enjoyed reading a number of the comments you've posted in recent days. Please continue and good luck with your evangelism!
Honestly, who talks like this in real life besides some HR drone? Its like you have these canned, cliche lines programmed into your brain or something.
What about the lack of women in relatively high paying skilled trades like electrician or elevator repair?
I think you'd get more bang for your buck by funding programs to help working class women move into skilled trades, than by trying to move middle class women who are already going to college from one major to another.
Proof that there used to be laws on the books banning women from working in mines, and feminists went and fought them. It's quite possible that the other reason you don't hear about female coal miners asking for more representation is that tech is worse at hiring women than coal mines are by now.
In China just recently in 2014, women led a massive Sanitation Worker strike. http://www.labornotes.org/2014/10/women-lead-sanitation-stri...
And also in the news in 2014 a female is head of NYC's Sanitation department. http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/kathryn-garcia-named-ne...