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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

Till that 15 to 17 percent changes (and it doesn't look like it will any time soon), that won't happen.

I'm curious if this is not only an effect, but also a cause. If the news reports that it is unusual for women to be in computing, doesn't that in a small way reinforce that message within popular culture? Newsweek should know better.

So basically you want newsweek to lie in order to promote a social cause? Because right now it is unusual, so that is how they should report it.

Isn't that called propaganda, and is the job of the government and ad agencies? (And they've both certainly done it successfully for plenty of causes they've decided were important.)

Journalistic integrity is important - even if it goes against your social cause.

This is a very common complaint about journalists, that by reporting on it, they are causing it. It might be a valid complaint, but any attempt to fix it makes it worse.

I think that article was essentially a propaganda piece, albeit unintentionally. My guess is that Newsweek puts out blurbs like that in order to reach out to a targeted demographic, in this case women.

The whole question of media bias really comes down to the bottom line. If a format of words plus carefully chosen images favored traditionally conservative causes (which for the most part they don't) there would be widespread complaints about right wing media bias. AS it is, I think there is very little remanent of journalistic ethics in mass media.

It's unusual, but it's also obviously unusual. So, do you take the obvious story, or do you figure out something new? Not that I'd expect Newsweek to do anything else.

Will the industry actually benefit if additional women join its workforce, rather than anyone (regardless of gender) who is competent and wants to? I suppose it's possible that there's something to gain from diversity, perhaps from morale or just diversity of mindsets/ideas/backgrounds, but that seems like a bit of an immeasurable stretch.

From the article:

> Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] said, “You know, we have seven engineers, and they’re all guys. But we’ve thought a lot about how we want to start our company, and we’ve read a lot of books, and we know that organizations work better when there is gender balance. So it’s important to us that we have a strong group of women, especially technical women, in the company.”

Interestingly, that's about the same as the percentage of women in the military. I wonder how much of that is coincidence, and how much is driven by common factors (culture/climate? self-selection?).

In tech's case, the extreme imbalance is fairly recent, though. Women are currently around 18-20% of new CS degrees, but in the early 1980s, they were 35-37%. Still a minority, but 2:1 rather than 4:1.

That's very interesting. Is this happening because fewer women are going into CS, or because way more men than women have gone into the field? A good way to answer this would be to look at some different statistics: what percentage of women college graduates majored in CS in the early '80s vs. today, and the same comparison for men. Of course, that doesn't answer the underlying question of why more men than women choose to major in CS.

CS was a relatively young discipline in the early '80s, so its share of total graduates has probably grown significantly since then. I'd be willing to bet that growth is due to both more men and more women entering the field, but disproportionately men. CS graduates back then were, in a sense, all "early adopters," so both the men and the women in the field were outside of the mainstream. It could be that men now consider CS to be mainstream, but women don't: among men, the discipline has grown as one would expect, but among women the discipline is stuck at an earlier stage. Of course, this just leads to further questions about why this disparity in adoption exists.

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