Six women computer scientists respond to why women don’t pursue computer science
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
I read all these responses with interest. The only strong opinion I hold is that we should accurately represent the thesis that we are discussing, even if it means we need to use more words to describe it. Mr. Regis didn't argue that women don't pursue computer science. He didn't say that it surprises him when some of the top computer scientists are women, he didn't say it surprises him when a woman has great interest in computer science. He made a ratio argument - that he believes that about 20% of the top computer science students and scholars will be women.
The sad thing is, I believe there's plenty to discuss, argue, even rightly object to in that thesis. But we must not claim that he said women can't be, or won't be computer scientists. He said the opposite - that some of the top computer scientists will and should be women. If someone believes that 20% of the elite computer scientists will be women, does that mean a woman in a class should worry that this professor doubts her competence or commitment?
This isn't a purely rhetorical question. If you deeply believe the main reason that women are less represented in computer science is because women ace powerful social deterrents, and that in the absence of these deterrents the percentage of women in CS would rise dramatically (far above 20%), then it could follow that a professor who openly states that 20%/80% represents the natural equilibrium must only be a professor who fails to see the issues that women face - and that this disqualifies him from a leadership position in a top computer science department.
A similar thing happened w/ the Google Memo when so many prominent media outlets (as well as commenters all over the Internet, including here at HN) attacked it for saying things it never said before the accusation was changed to "well, it was based on bad science". By the time it got to that point, the conversation sort of dissipated, and I didn't get to hear much debate about the science.
I don't have an opinion in either case, but it does seem like one side is consistently doing the misrepresenting. And it leaves me (a more-or-less neutral observer), suspicious: after all, why would you resort to misrepresentation if you're confident in your position?
Consider this passage from the second essay, which seeks to school men on how to avoid discouraging women:
In my case, my college adviser assumed I’d be going to medical school and did not guide me toward the courses I’d need in computer science. During my senior year, when he discovered his assumption was wrong, there was little time left to fill in the blanks in my education. It is easy to assume the wrong thing about someone, and this is where implicit bias can creep in. It is far better simply to ask.
The implicit assumption in this paragraph is eye watering: she appears to believe it was up to her advisor to telepathically figure out that she was not in fact interested in medical school, and would prefer computer science, without her ever telling him that. In Mankoff's world view it wasn't up to her say, actually I want to do computing, could you steer me towards courses I'll need for that that please? Rather it was up to him to "discover" that his "assumption" was wrong.
But she took the courses the advisor recommended, so, apparently his assumptions weren't so wrong. She agreed with his advice after all. There's clearly some misrepresentation of the poor advisor going on here: he didn't pull medical school out of thin air, she must have indicated a bit of interest, then she changed her mind and has re-interpreted her own life story to make her own indecisiveness the man's fault instead of her own.
A "blame men" attitude seems rampant in such stories. There are two anecdotes about someone else trying to take credit for their work. Instead of blaming human nature and recognising everyone suffers this they make it about men vs women. Pratt says men interrupt her in meetings. Guess what, men interrupt each other in meetings all the time. That isn't sexism. It's how men talk sometimes. Interrupt them back, perhaps.
The third essay is pure ad hominem insults and trash - anyone who disagrees with Julie Letchner is a "mole" who needs "whacking", by which she means Reges should lose his job. It's deeply unfortunate that women like Letchner claim to speak on behalf of all women and apparently meet no resistance. Where are all the women standing up for Reges and his right to explore these issues? Not a single essay is supportive of him. Perhaps that's deliberate by the Seattle Times.
The essay by Pratt reveals she's got another problem that she probably can't recognise:
Last year, I asked my students to describe why they think women are underrepresented in STEM fields.
Isn't she supposed to be teaching computer science? This question is asking the student's opinions. There is no right answer to such a question. But she doesn't see that ...
I was dumbfounded that students would put their names on such statements and submit them to me — a woman grading their responses.
... and we can assume proceeded to downgrade everyone who submitted the "wrong" i.e. non feminist answers, whilst marvelling at their stupidity in assuming their female professor might actually be neutral or fair. Yes, how foolish of those students to submit their real opinions instead of flattering their professor's political biases. If she's spending her time on this sort of "teaching" it might explain why she gets paid less than her male peers, who presumably don't.
I’d rather see some explanations from women who chose not to code. That helps with understanding where the blockage is.
Something must have been lost in translation...
> The women are responding to an essay about why women don't want to code. As women who do want to code they're exactly the right people to ask.
How are they "exactly the right people to ask"? They're the exact opposite! Can you see the backwards logic in your comment? If you want to know why someone's doing or not doing something, ask them, not the people who chose opposite.
You couldn't prove such a hypothesis wrong by talking to women who don't want to code.
The argument at hand is if the 20% representation level is a result of discrimination and bias in the field, or something else.
Why isn't it ok that they just aren't interested in it? Women have agency and intelligence and if they want to do something then they can and will do it.
I find this whole obsession with "Women in X" to be suspicious because nobody is interested in gender disparities in other fields and starting up "Men in X". So it's not a generic effort to understand a gender disparity, it is a specific directed effort to force women (who have agency and freedom) to go into a field that they don't really seem that interested in. Blaming men for women not taking CS degrees either directly or indirectly IMO denies womens agency and is totally unnecessary.
I think women are doing what they want to do, and they largely don't want to take CS it seems. Maybe if society stopped nagging them about it the situation might change organically.
I've been in more than one professional situation where I was made uncomfortable with how a co-worker or manager was referring to female candidates/co-workers. I'm not talking about good-natured joking around on the job or even flirting, but rather something that in retrospect I can honestly say was discrimination. I also recall that in those situations, I was in no position to do anything about it so it's not like speaking up would have helped... more likely I would have been shortly out of a gig myself.
I can recall someone who did that before he became my manager.
Or that they should leave the field so that some more deserving woman could take their place?
I know a man who was told almost exactly that by a professor. (Minus the woman specifier.)
So, "you should leave this field so someone more deserving can have a place"? When you take out the gender qualifier it doesn't seem so ominous.
This is not a problem that's unique to STEM or CS or anything like that though.
>another talked about being encouraged to drop out so a more deserving man could take her place... that's not lack of interest, that's actively discouraging those who want to be here
Again, I don't see that as a problem thats particularly tied to CS or programming or STEM or whatever. I'm not saying its not a problem but thats simply a general problem. I mean a woman could literally name any field and state those reasons and it would have the same impact, and be equally as bad, but those aren't problems specific to the field of STEM or CS or programming or whatever.
>I've been in more than one professional situation where I was made uncomfortable with how a co-worker or manager was referring to female candidates/co-workers
I've literally been in the room when my boss made weird sexual comments to a female coworker. We looked at each other wide-eyed like neither of us could believe this was really happening, and it was like something out of a training video it was so stereotypical. She thought it was weird but it didn't really phase her, she just let it pass and didn't call him out on it. I think he was just socially weird and didn't realize how his comment would be received until he saw our faces. Nobody said anything and we just carried on with our meeting. She seemed to just take it as "this happens occasionally" almost like encountering road rage on the highway, like I'm not going to give up driving because some people are annoying. I think she took this type of attitude.
These things happen and the level of behavior control/policing that would be required to eliminate such occurrences would be onerous. The cure would be worse than the disease in my opinion. Particularly heinous harrasment can already be dealt with in the legal sphere. I don't want to hand wave it away but, I don't think it can be eliminated in a practical way TBH.
The puzzling thing is that many of the proponents of the "sexism => gender disparity" hypothesis seem to regard digging deeper into their claims as sexism. It's almost as though they think "not being sexist" demands that we only sample/write-about/etc those women-in-tech who have horror stories about workplace sexism and anything else is "denying their lived experiences" or some such.
For example, when I try to understand why women in medicine and law in the 80s and 90s were so much more successful than women in tech today, proponents of the discrimination hypothesis come after me like I've committed some grievous moral infraction.
A quick google search turns up groups for and mainstream media discussion of men in nursing and men in teaching.
Is it "suspicious" that one that you as an engineer see the most of is the one that (a) involves your own field and (b) involves a currently-extremely-prominent-in-media-overall field (fake news, election meddling, self-driving cars, Uber, etc)?
It just isn't a thing that registers much for the non-engineering people I know.
I have no idea how much I'd see discussion about men in nursing if I was a nurse. I know a few (women) nurse, it's something they've mentioned occasionally, same with teachers. But in both cases, you see much less of anything about those fields in the news right now.
That doesn't follow. The obstacles the women who succeeded in CS perceive aren't necessarily the same obstacles that drive women who don't succeed in or who don't pursue CS. Sometimes these will overlap, but not necessarily.
Clearly the obstacles faced by women who succeeded were insufficient to deter them, so we need to know what obstacles were successful deterrents.
For example, my mother had me at 18, and managed to struggle through college anyway. The reason she was even able to go to school is she had 2 sisters that could take turns babysitting me. If she had 1 sister, it wouldn't have been tenable. If she didn't have a family, same.
So she's very much aware of how difficult it was to get through college, and she readily says "if it weren't for your aunts, I would never have a degree."
I'm skeptical of this sort of claim. The sexism barriers in medicine and law were much higher, yet women persevered and achieved gender parity despite them. I don't think women are so easily deterred as you seem to imply.
That said, of course it's still worthwhile to eliminate overt sexism of the sorts described in the article, but I don't think for a second it will change the gender ratios by very much. The sort of sexism described is unfortunately everywhere.
One of my female Computer Science professors used to brag about how she didn't code.
It's not uncommon for academics to stop coding at some point in their career. They basically become managers.
1. Lack of coding in K-12 means fewer women are exposed to coding and thus don't become interested in it during the career selection phase of life.
2. Individuals bias' subtly steer women away from C.S.
3. Once inside a C.S. career, women are systemically marginalized.
4. Once inside a C.S. career, women face overt (and often sexual) discrimination as well as subtle displays of disregard due to their gender(i.e. microagressions).
5. Discriminatory comments from peers before entering C.S.
6. The palpable fact of being a minority and, thus, feeling isolated, irrespective of discrimination.
I would suggest that finding ways of depoliticizing the discussion would help everyone out in the long run, especially since nearly all political issues appear to have become zero-sum games. I think putting the experiences of women who are in C.S. within a broader context would help give more clarity to the issue. I would think of including the following:
1) The experience of women in non-STEM careers with low percentages of women, particularly the trades (for example, women in Canada make up only 4.5% of people in the trades[0]).
2) The experiences of women who did not go into STEM and why they did not choose it.
3) The experience of men who did go into STEM careers and why.
4) The experience of men in careers with large percentages of women (e.g. teaching, nursing, etc).
I would suspect we wound find a mix of bias, discrimination within industry, and personal preferences corresponding to gender. The interesting question is what is the mix?
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/3823621/women-skilled-trades-manu...
1) Lack of IT courses in K-12 affects both genders, why make this a female issue?
2) Completely subjective.
3) Pretty much the opposite. There are tons of events for women only, as well as grants and positions that are available for women only or where they’re more likely to get hired than men (so quota is filled).
4) Most of women (as in 99%) in CS don’t suffer this. Even this being of importance, I believe this happens in all industries.
5) Similar to point 3.
6) Well, empower yourself? What do we tell to male nurses then?
Edit: formatting
The problem with that is that there is a clear agenda by both sides on this issue. No one wants to be discriminated against. I (male) don't want to be discriminated against in order to force women into CS. I (male) also DO NOT want women to be discriminated against to force men into positions. I assume most (not all) people agree with this even if they flip the gender. But how to execute this is political.
If we can instead approach this scientifically. To determine if there is a predisposition towards a specific career based on gender, societal pressure, discrimination, bias, etc. We can then propose political solutions that can drive society towards equilibrium.
https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2018/05/15/harvey-mudd-graduat...
Harvey Mudd is a very elite college with considerable resources, and it has a relatively small class, especially compared to large public universities.
https://www.hmc.edu/institutional-research/institutional-sta...
It looks like there were 27 CS majors out of Harvey Mudd in 2017. We can probably add in another 20 from the joint CS-Math degree. So, about 50.
Here are the numbers for Berkeley:
https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers
Berkeley graduates almost a thousand students in EE or CS every year. The accounting is tough here because the degrees at Harvey Mudd and Berkeley are different, so I may be over or under counting, but I hope you can see my point - Harvey Mudd succeeds in a way that might not apply once you try to reach scale.
Consider that 27% of the high school students who take the AP Computer science test are women. This next part is a big assumption, but let's say that this reflects the percentage of students in the current pipeline, and that a "5" on this test clearly represents a high talent student. It's not the only way to identify such as student, but it is a strong indicator.
Harvey Mudd could probably fill it's entire class, all 50 spots, with women who got a 5 on the AP CS test. Harvey Mudd could probably go up to 100% women without meaningfully compromising admissions standards. Remember, this debate is about ratios. The author of the controversial piece is not under fire for saying that talented women don't go into CS, he's under fire for saying that 20% is a natural equilibrium.
Yes, Harvey Mudd could fill its small but very elite CS class entirely from the 20% of the top cohort. But could Berkeley, and Michigan, and UW, and Georgia Tech, and...
I'm not saying that these schools can't achieve parity, nor am I arguing that they shouldn't. But the process for getting to parity across lots and lots of large schools is very different from what Harvey Mudd can do. There would still be lots of men with "5"'s looking for a spot, but not as many women - simply because there aren't as many women taking the test.
At some point, the elite programs will be unbalanced if they simply reflect the pipeline. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try for more equity, but we should recognize that Harvey Mudd's approach won't necessarily scale, it may reflect the recruiting advantages of an elite, well funded school with lots of resources and very few undergraduates.
Mudd is a relatively new college and actually doesn't have the same level of resources as some other selective colleges, at least not when measured on an endowment dollars per student basis. I'm not convinced that this is a resource issue. It seems like focus and commitment by the administration and faculty are more important.
Maybe those hurdles are what other women face, hmmmm
In fact in my personal experience talking with women while I was in college who started off in CS or others that took intro CS courses typically the responses were:
"Didn't click for me"
"Didn't like all the math requirements"
"Found it boring and teadious"
"Isolated, rather work with people"
The headline reads: "A UW professor argued that women don’t want to code. What do women computer scientists have to say?"
The sub headline reads: "Six women computer scientists from the University of Washington respond to an essay about why women don’t pursue computer science as often as men."
In some ways, I think that misrepresenting these headlines can be harmful. A young woman considering CS who reads the headline might conclude that a professor at UW things that women, across the board, are uninterested in the CS major. If she reads the sub-headline, she might conclude that he believes that fewer of the top students will be women, but that certainly some of them will be.
I can't say that the second is welcoming, but it's a very, very different statement from the first.
For instance, suppose about 20% of his class is women. He's not saying that this 20% of his class shouldn't be there, or won't rise to the top. He is saying that it may not be productive to even out this ratio. Plenty to disagree with and object to in that thesis. But that is very different from not believing in the women who take his class, and it is utterly different from sabotaging the women in his class (making sure they don't rise to the top).
I want to be very clear in this comment and elsewhere that I believe that there is plenty to object to in the claim that 20% represents some kind of natural plateau. My position is that we need to accurately represent the point of view that we are debating.
All this talk about being promoted and receiving pay raises is funny to me. Never in my work history I was just 'promoted'. One climbs up by looking for new and better job. Same goes to pay.
Where is this magical land where men climb up by being men? I'd love to experience that!
Also, coding is not some magical job. For most people I know the line between work/free time barely exist. People that are good 1) code all day at work and then 2) go home and code some more at home. 1 and 2 may be unrelated but only on the surface. By coding at home they improve their skills and do better at work. But there's a price to pay. Other hobbies/interests have to be sacrificed. So is social life.
All articles of this kind make it sound like coding is some sort of magical job that's easy and well paid and has no downsides. My life experience is that finding a good programming job is incredibly hard and only very few people I know are happy with theirs. More often than not it's just daily grind.
Are AP CS exams relevant now? I took both in the early 90s, then got to college only to find out that nobody accepted AP credit in CS. Every school said "we use C, and the AP exam uses Pascal".
Curious if anyone younger has a different experience.
That's why it's called the AP Computer Science exam rather than the AP Programming exam.
any self respecting university should not accept credit for passing it.
I don't think you appreciate what a CS degree means.
Yeah, I will admit am not too keyed up on what a CS degree entails. I thought it was like CS 101, CS advanced or something like that, some other choice of CS electives like visual programming, and then the usual course load that is required for most other degrees like English, etc. I know for certain though, just by looking through some of the videos on MIT's opencourseware and Harvard's videos and problem sets for their beginning CS course, that the even if you could get a perfect score on your AP computer science exam you could easily be unprepared for advanced programming classes at university. I don't think an exam and a high school cs class is anywhere near enough to be worth college level cs credit.
Edit: Putting "archive.is" in front of a URL works often for me.
outline.com/<article_url>
and do the same with men, and compare
not sure that we have to tools to understand these sorts of questions quantitatively, but i'd like to see at the least some qualitative data instead of opinions (whether reges or this group)
It's ironic that Reges' carefully crafted letter drew as much ire as Damore's sophomoric, easy-to-nitpick essay, when his entire letter is a trap laid bare. Given his keen awareness of the possibility of his employment's termination and his mention of displeasure of what he sees as chilling effect in tech and academia against voicing criticism of current sociopolitical headwinds, he's armored a reasonable discussion with indications that he knows some people will call for his head. And unremarkably, it happened in the one response that addresses his points the least!
If you are interested in an opposite opinion from another woman coder: https://medium.com/@marlene.jaeckel/the-empress-has-no-cloth...
Reality looks very different.
Women have a 2:1 chance over men to get a job in STEM: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2015/11/04/women-favored-2-...
more detailed research on this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611984/
Then there's the Scandinavian gender paradox, which states that women are LESS likely to choose a career in STEM the more equal society becomes. This is because there's no more economic necessity, and other reasons. See http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl...
I'm not surprised by the responses of these women. They represent the acceptable opinion of Silicon Valley.
Hey, I guess as long as it supports your hypothesis, right?
Then I provided data. I don't care about anecdotes
A lot of people on HN seem to have this bizarre rejection of any evidence that wasn't collected by objective experimentation--something which isn't possible in this sort of context. So you do the next best thing: you survey people, and their responses (i.e., anecdotes) form the data. As with experimental data, in the real world, different things will happen to different (test) subjects, which is why you need to collect sufficient data to have a representative sample.
In this case--why does it matter that Scandinavian women are less likely to choose a career in STEM? How is that relevant to Silicon Valley, or the US computer programming industry? Why does it matter that women have a 2:1 preference for STEM jobs--that's just a reaction to the initial problem, namely--why aren't women pursuing STEM jobs?
American women are not far behind Scandinavian women on the equality index. Same applies to them.
Remember, "you didn't build that?" President Obama made the argument that businesses do rely on substantial government services that are critical to a healthy commerce sector. He said "If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
It was a clumsy way to put it, but it was clear to me what Obama was saying. Yet many on the right attacked him for stating that people who have a business didn't build their business.
Again, it's sad, because you know what? I think the center-right has a decent point to make here. Perhaps the government should leave some of these services to the private sector. Perhaps they are providing them inefficiently. There's all kinds of ways to disagree, discuss, debate, and rightly object to President Obama's thesis.
But we didn't get that debate. Instead, we got treated to a ton of misrepresentation, 30 second attack ads, and non-discussion posturing around something that someone didn't even say in the first place. And the public was actually denied an important debate and discussion that might have led to a greater understanding of the relationship between government regulation and private business.
Yeah, the right does this all the time. I will agree with you, though, that the left does this cynically and perhaps deliberately, especially on this topic.
Another time, John Kerry said "You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq”"
His scripted statement was supposed to be: "Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush."
It was a pretty dumb statement, and I gotta say, even the scripted one was no prize winning quip. But of course the republicans of course had a field day with this one, claiming that Kerry was arguing that only unintelligent and uneducated people serve in the armed forces in Iraq.
And it was hard to watch a guy who received multiple educational deferrments righteously scold a vet with shrapnel embedded in his ass for saying that people use education to avoid military service.
Trust me, the right does this plenty. Plenty. So does the left. Plenty.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18086490 and marked it off-topic.
The first essay is a bit high-level, but the second lays out some pretty specific, straightforward ways that women get the short end of the stick in the CS field:
> It is more common for men to get credit for collaborative work than women, something I experienced when a student wrote in a publication draft that an idea of mine originated with a collaborator — even though progeny of the idea had never been discussed.
If you don't care enough to read that far and then assume that this means there's no "real reason", I think that's the definition of willful ignorance.
Is there anything worth reading in these essays that is genuinely unique to women? Because so far it sounds like damore round two. The only form of unarguable, gender specific discrimination I see in computing is against men.
In this article, 6 women in prominent CS roles each wrote essays in response.
1 is professor at the same school, says his thesis is wrong because the numbers are changing to be closer to equal (On a intro-to-code website for students K-8, genders were split 55/45 boys to girls).
2 is professor at the same school, says the gender gap happens because by not expecting girls to be programmers, then girls don't expect it of themselves, and when they do they don't get offered as much help, so it becomes self-fulfilling.
3 is PhD alum from the UW and lead data scientist at a startup, says girls often don't like CS because they feel unheard or taken advantage of, and that the article is a mean but ironic example of women's opinions being ignored. She also insinuates that the professor should be reprimanded for writing it.
4 is professor at the school, says discrimination (sexual harassment, unequal pay, condescending attitudes) are rampant in the field and make it hard for women to stay motivated.
5 is undergrad alum from the school with high honors & PhD student at Cornell, says girls lose interest because they're frequently undermined. She also thinks the wrong people get recommended to CS at a young age (e.g. kids who like computer games but not kids who like math). She says having supportive parents and good role models is necessary.
6 is undergrad alum from the school and software engineer at Microsoft who TA'd for the original professor, says it's hard to stay confident because the field is male-dominated, and that articles like these make it worse.
Everyone agrees that the issue is very complicated, and says so in their essay.
[1] https://quillette.com/2018/06/19/why-women-dont-code/
edit: removed names of the responders
I suggest skimming