Computer science lacks women, minorities
sdtimes.com
The National Science Foundation says that women and minorities are not seeking jobs in computer science. A job shortage looms.
sdtimes.com
I'd suggest that a large part of the reason is the issue of prestige. In America, intelligent black people will tend to choose high prestige, low-risk career paths more often than not. A lot of it is about the uncertainty of failure; In black communities, a lot is expected of the really smart kids. They're seen as not just representing themselves, but also their communities and, to an extent, their race. It sucks, but it's the truth. So a lot of them choose to be doctors, lawyers, etc, because you're viewed differently by society. If we ever get to the point that being a software engineer is viewed in the same light as the aforementioned occupations, I'm sure there would be a sizable increase.
Seems plausible.
If women feel unwelcome in areas of computer science (and I know that they do, and don't really judge their feelings on that), men in professions where they have to deal with kids are even more ostracized.. and we don't seem to be dealing with that problem properly either as a society (and I'd argue the men-children issue is more important to society overall).
But this is why it's not called "equalism".
The feminist fighting for greater rights than men is a stereotype that represents only a small (but extremely vocal) minority of feminists.
But does that mean we can't even talk about why our profession in particular attracts so few women, while lots of other "knowledge worker" professions are more balanced? Do we have to resolve all other fairness issues first, before we can even talk about it?
I think it's an interesting topic and that the hostility and derisiveness that usually surrounds these articles are unjustified.
A lot of work in all professions is needed to solve this problem and we must devote all of our time to point that out equally.
Hookers for example is another problem area, most hookers are women. Where are all the male hookers?
I think also there is a lack of women in the fishing industry, out on the boats.
I would be interested in why few women choose IT. However, the phrasing of the headline made it sound like more than just talking. "Lack" implies a problem that needs fixing, doesn't it?
But what if the reason that women don't take part in CS is because it isn't desirable? What if women avoid the field because it's a glorified, white-collar version of ditch-digging, without career longevity or personal growth?
I consider that likely, actually. I am also not sure who is shouting about the women in IT issue - is it really feminists?
I mean, so what if women are "underrepresented." Who says there should/needs to be a balance in every profession of men and women working in the same fields?
Like Tichy said below, women are underrepresented in garbage collection, too. No one seems to write articles about that, though.
If women, for instance, are genetically predisposed to liking engineering less or being less capable at engineering, then it's not an issue. If they avoid engineering because of other factors, don't you think that's something that should be fixed?
"Large segments of the U.S. population are not considering careers in IT"
This struck me as incredibly odd when every discipline that used a lot of math had very low numbers of women. Purportedly because "women find math hard". With the result that when I took a third year differential equations course, there was a sea of men. In my fourth year number theory course, half the (admittedly small) class were women.
Those numbers may have changed radically since.
I dunno, the last thing this field needs are more people without passion, regardless of personal demographic. If someone isn't considering a career in IT, why push them? They'll have a hard time achieving much success if they don't care that much, and they'll make life suck for their fellow workers.
I can't imagine doing anything else. I would hope that others considering the field felt the same way, no matter who they are.
It would be fascinating to get Zogby to run a poll which would ask the following questions:
What does a camshaft do?
What is a vertical flyback interval?
What role does expansion play in refrigeration?
What does an address bus do?
Timed delay of arrival is the basis of what common technological service?
What is the role of a CCD in a digital camera?
Name any spacecraft now in orbit around anything.
What does TCP/IP stand for?
What is the purpose of a torque wrench?
The questions measure, I think, the degree to which people understand the physical world in which they live. Now, I may be wrong (almost inconceivable, I know, it has to happen sometime, like an asteroid strike) but I will bet that anyone scoring perfectly on the foregoing will be male. In fact, anyone coming close will be male. Should this prove true, the conclusion must be that men and women inhabit utterly different head-spaces.
That strikes me as the reification of what's pretty clearly a social difference. More men than women know what a torque wrench is, because we teach boys about torque wrenches and let boys know that they ought to know what one is, while we teach girls about other things and let them know that it's okay to be ignorant about torque wrenches.
When I was a kid there was a common party game where the boys and girls would break up into separate teams, and the boys would attempt to come up with questions that they could all answer but would stump all the girls, and the girls would do the same to the boys. It was, at least that I ever saw, always much easier for the girls to come up with questions that would stump us guys than for us to come up with "common guy knowledge" that would stump all the girls. There were always more girls who knew "guy things" than guys who knew (or were willing to admit to knowing) "girl things."
I'm not sure that really proves anything except there was a wider diversity (at least within the relatively limited sample of kids I grew up with) of acceptable gender role behaviors for girls than for boys. Girls certainly can know "guy stuff" when they're exposed to it, that much was pretty obviously clear.
It may be that there's some biological difference between how men and women approach problems, or learn various skills. But I can guarantee you that those differences are, like differences associated with skin color, far less than the differences between individuals in the same group.
I always chuckle when people trot that one out. Did you know it's equally true for the differences between dog breeds? Body size varies more within dog breeds than between them. Also intelligence. Somehow that doesn't stop dog breeds from being fairly different from each other. (Actually, somewhat more than human races from the genetic studies I've seen.)
As for the differences between guys and girls being taught not inborn...how many kids do you have? Parents get disabused of that sort of thinking pretty quickly.
I have never understood what this means. "Within-group" variation can be quantified as standard deviation (among other metrics). How do you measure "between-group" variation? Sample the group means and find the standard deviation? But that's obviously meaningless.
So you find the tallest white person in the world and the shortest, and note that they differ in height by a number of feet. Then you measure the difference between the white height average and the Asian height average, and note that the difference is only a few centimeters. Wallah! Race doesn't matter. Most variation is within group.
Like I said, I chuckle a bit.