September 12, 2004

• OOh good stuff, fuyugare. You know, I'll bet that you'll find a disproportionate number of women with the kinds of minds and personalities suited for computer science and other technical fields, in therapy dealing with depression or anxiety. The culture discourages women from indulging in the kind of alone-time required to develop those sorts of skills and encourages us to socialise. Maybe the remedy for the low number of geekgirls would be to let us wander off in our thoughts and be alone sometimes without being forced to become social butterflies?
• Anecdotally, it's no better now than it was when I started in 1998.
• i knew a lot of women who started out as CS majors. by the time they graduated, they were OR&IE majors.
• But you combine CS with something else, and it gets better. I am in bioinformatics, and about half of my graduate program is women. And I have many friends in web design and interface design. I think the idea that women should spend their time helping others is very prevalent in society, so the more "helpful" a science is, the more women you see. Mathematics and theoretical physics, not many women. Biology and medicine, tons of women.
• Um, speaking of which...does anyone know a good, free, small database program for Mac? I am tivo-ing up quite a movie collection and want to be able to index it by disc, title, genre, rating, and actor. IANACSgeek, so good documentation would be helpful as well. My email is in my profile. Hmmm...maybe I should curious george this, but it doesn't seem like a very good first post.
• That's funny, I was just looking at this book today: Unlocking the Clubhouse : Women in Computing, which was written by two of the people who authored the linked papers. This phenomenon seems more pronounced in the United States than in many other countries. I've compared notes with coworkers from other countries, and they tell me that non-U.S. computer science programs have a much better balance of male to female students. The authors of "Unlocking the Clubhouse" also observed this in their study of computer science students. That raises interesting questions about what social factors in the U.S. push many smart women out of computer-related fields, especially given how many more women are entering other engineering and science disciplines.
• Would the U.S. be different from Canada or the U.K. (which I've never noticed) - or other Anglo and western countries? Or when they say "international" do they mean mostly women from Asia, etc?
• I was thinking Asia, South America, to a likely lesser extent Africa, because there isn't so much of a computing industry there. And it would be interesting if suposedly more sexist countries had a higher proportion of women in male fields. Maybe many factors - different levels of sexism at different social statuses, different attitude towards computers or towards higher education in general (I noticed in one of the links that international women in CS in the states cited "practical" as a reason more often than American women) - could the lack of women in CS or science in general be a reflection not just of barriers, but also of their openness to do something like Arts which is seen to be more fun, but less lucrative? Probably many factors all at once - maybe we should ask how many males do computing even when they hate it and are really bad, compared to females : ) - offtopic, but supporting argument for my point - I was once on a committee that was suposed to help undergrads when they were failing - I can't count the number of times when we had people with C's and D's in something like Computer Science or Economics (their major), but Bs and As in English.
• I used to be a CS major. All the girls I know of were grossly incompetent. And half crazy. But then, so were 90% of the students. It was really something to behold, the piss-poor skills of the student body. But then, the introductory language was C. If I had known then what I know now, I would have run for the door as soon as I found that out.
• What would you have preferred? Java? {S,OCa}ml? Haskell? Scheme? LISP? I don't think too many places are still using C.
• The introductory languague at my school was Pascal. In 1998. I'm still bitter about that. C++ or Java would've been much more useful. Not that it matters now, because... maybe we should ask how many males do computing even when they hate it. Me one. However, gender played no role in my choice of major. It was greed and greed-induced stupidity.
• kenshin, trying learning QuickBasic as your first programming language, and see how easily that segues into something remotely useful. Teach me for going to a girls' school where they thought pansy-ass Basic had a purpose and the computer science teacher was actually only qualified in geography.
• Hee. I learned BASIC in grade 5. The classic version, with line numbers. I remember writing a 100% text-based Q&A adventure game all by myself. My one and only fond memory of programming. Nowadays the only "programming" I occasionally do at work involves the many bastard children of Visual Basic. Isn't the full circle funny? [weeps]
• The introductory languague at my school was Pascal. In 1998. I'm still bitter about that. C++ or Java would've been much more useful. Not that it matters now, because... I work on project with a Russian guy who just got his Masters in Comp Sci, and he only learned Pascal. Ouch. BTW, my first language was Pilot. Pretty cool, every command as a single letter. (Max 26 commands, tho.)
• The only programming language I ever bothered to learn was BASIC, and then only because you had to manually program the games into the Commodore 64 every time you booted it up. That was before we got the cassette deck you could record them onto. Sweet!
• Oh yeah Cali, I remember programming games onto my parents' C64. They didn't get a computer until '93 or so (and then it was the Compydore 64, bought at a garage sale), and what with my one computer studies class they'd watch in awe as I typed line after numbered line of crappy code from a book.
• fuyugare: Lisp, Haskell, *ml would have been ok. However, it was a "well, we spun off CS from Electrical Engineering like, 5 years ago" kind of school. Some courses were good (assembly, math, Hnnessy & Patterson), others were awful (comp. sci 101, 102, 103, etc.). Not nearly theorical enough for my tastes & needs. Mind you, this was during the .com bubble, so the program was awfully overcrowded and understaffed. I mean "hey, not only is this course given by a TA, but after reading the book & doing the exercises, I'm actually more qualified than him to give it! Because he obviously never did that." kind of overcrowded. It was a case of 3-4 good professors trying to stay afloat in a 1000 undergrads department.