sorting 3944

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Maybe there are people saying "no women in computing" as exaggeration for effect. Maybe there are people saying it, meaning it, and being wrong. Mostly what I hear is people saying women are "underrepresented" in computing. This is not the same thing, and is a separate issue, but we'll get to that later.

Am I? The quoted text above says nothing about percentages, only that there are women in computing jobs. I wouldn't automatically buttume that that means anything other than "it's false to say there are *no* women in computing jobs" -- so it's entirely consistent with the numbers I quoted.

There's an old joke about how the best way to get information from a Usenet group is to post wrong information, though, so maybe my saying this will inspire someone out in the field to provide a counterexample (or point me to one I missed upthread) showing that there's at least one workplace that's seriously out of synch with the DoL's statistics.

They're certainly counted *somewhere* .... What do you want to know here? maybe how that 15% (which may be low) compares to the overall percentage of undergraduates who are female? what the popular press is saying about that lately, by the way, is that it's well over 50%.

I can't speak for everyone infected with PCitis (I'd like to claim to be in "recovering" status, but you might not buy that), but:

Letting people choose what they want to do sounds wonderful. They're apt to make better choices (in terms of ending up in jobs they will enjoy and be good at), though, if they choose based on relatively realistic information about what various jobs are actually like. My feeling is that many people make choices based on very misleading impressions -- the stereotype of the solitary no-social-skills hacker-programmer in this case. I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a plausible explanation.

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Pretty boring, I would think. It's just that I don't remember actually encountering (in print, in person, etc.) someone who called herself-himself a feminist and expressed this atbreastude. (Maybe there were some, and I just don't remember because mentally I buttigned them to the "empty suits" category and didn't think more about them. Plenty of those, men and women alike.)

Your mileage obviously varies (i.e., differs from mine). I'm still trying to figure out why.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.