Please Stop Asking Me to Speak About Women in Technology

Re:Please Stop Asking Me to Speak About Women in Technology by dragonwriter on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @08:13PM (#7881175)

> One factor is that it's easier for women to apply to med school or law school because there's no required major.

This is true of most graduate and professional programs. I had a friend in college whose undergraduate degree was in Rhetoric and Communication, who then went into a Physics Ph.D. program.

> If you want to be a CS major, however, you need to commit freshman year.

Whether that's true or not depends on the school, and its not necessarily generally particularly true of CS, though it may be more true of CS at particular institutions. OTOH, unlike law or medicine, where a particular professional degree is essentially mandatory [1], technology has no particular degree requirement (while a CS degree is helpful, particularly for the best jobs, its not a legal requirement to enter the field and plenty of people in the field don't have a CS degree.)

Anyhow, I'm not sure any of that is relevant -- why is the requirement for a particular degree, or a requirement to commit early for a degree, a barrier for women entering the field? Are you arguing that women are inherently less likely to commit early?

[1] in some states, its still possible to meet the requirements to practice law through what amounts to a private apprenticeship rather than professional degree.

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Re:Please Stop Asking Me to Speak About Women in Technology by mtdewcmu on Thursday June 12, 2014 @06:20AM (#7882622)

Is it possible that women may be exercising their free will by choosing to go into fields like medicine and law not into fields like computer science, simply because more women prefer the former over the latter? It's apparently impossible to prove this, because the fact of women expressing a dislike for CS and not choosing to major in it is assumed to be problematic on the face and self-evident proof of bias and discrimination. It's a bad idea to even openly suggest the possibility. But consider, as a thought experiment, what the world might look like if there truly existed a preference among women for some school subjects and against certain other subjects, among them CS. It would probably look a lot like the world we are in. Now consider whether it's implausible that a difference in subject preferences could exist between men and women. It doesn't seem all that implausible to me. If my statistics are up to date, women are now attending college at a slightly higher rate than men. Since women make up a huge presence on college campuses, you might expect that if large numbers of women were interested in CS, but faced bias, there would be more of a grass-roots movement to bring attention to the subject. But, instead, the interest seems to be coming from researchers looking at statistics, not students with personal stories of discrimination. To me, the fact that women have entered equally-prestigious fields like biology and medicine with great success is evidence against the idea that women are being relegated to study less challenging subjects and settle for careers that are not intellectually demanding. I am skeptical that the lack of a 50/50 split between men and women in some technical subjects is evidence of a problem that needs a solution.

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Re:Please Stop Asking Me to Speak About Women in Technology by vellum on Thursday June 12, 2014 @12:47AM (#7881857)

Anyhow, I'm not sure any of that is relevant -- why is the requirement for a particular degree, or a requirement to commit early for a degree, a barrier for women entering the field?

When discussing women in tech, people bring up how the candidate pool mirrors the pipeline. See the recent discussion on Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813310

Are you arguing that women are inherently less likely to commit early?

Guys are more likely to start coding in high school or earlier, so they're the ones starting freshman year. For example, the number of women who take the AP CS test is ~18%, which is close to the % of CS degree grads who are women.

http://www.exploringcs.org/resources/cs-statistics

If you want to graduate in 4 years, you have to start your CS program freshman year. You can switch later, but you're going to have to pay for more semesters, or work harder and cram in more units. And yes, you can start coding after 22, but it's an uphill battle.

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Re:Please Stop Asking Me to Speak About Women in Technology by dragonwriter on Thursday June 12, 2014 @12:59AM (#7881883)

> And yes, you can start coding after 22, but it's an uphill battle.

"Getting an undergraduate degree other than CS" isn't the same thing as "start programming after graduating".

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