winscape 2179

Well, doesn't this kind of depend on what "women do computers" means? Most people in this group would probably agree that if it means that there are some women with technical (computing) abilities and interests, it's obviously true, but if it means something about the proportion of women in technical fields being close to 50%, it's obviously false.

Well .... If it's a required course that all freshmen take, yeah, I'd be inclined to agree.

However, some schools have as part of the required courses some kind of freshman seminar, where the topics vary from year to year, and the objective is less to teach about the specific topic than to get the students to read and think and discuss and write papers. I can easily imagine "Why Are There So Few Women in CS?" being a topic for such a course. I can imagine it being a good course. I can also imagine it being fairly worthless, possibly just a vehicle for the instructor to spout his-her views.

Like what? As far as I can tell, he's proposing this as a possible explanation of your reaction, not saying one way or another what he thinks might be true.

Okay, but there might be some disagreement about whether anything is "broke". Everything I have ever read about the subject says that the overwhelming majority of people in technical jobs are male -- it's not 100%, maybe it's not 90%, I don't know, but it's also not anywhere close to 50%. Now, you might not think this is a problem, or you might think that any proposed cure would be worse than the alleged disease, but then again ....:

Some well-known-in-some-circles female CS person once observed something like the following (I hope I'm getting this approximately right): A lot of technology is invented-developed by a fairly small segment of the population (mostly young males), so it tends to focus on their needs and interests. What would technology be like if the people doing the inventing-developing were a more diverse group? Might it appeal more to, or work better for, people who right now find it uninteresting or unusable?

I think these are interesting questions to ask, in the context of whether the current state of things is "broke".

What you do with the answers is another question, and I'm not saying anything about that.

Your "each and every CS freshman" seems to suggest that all CS majors are taking this course. True?

As for whether such a course gives women an excuse for things going wrong, or men an excuse for dismissing them .... It seems to me that it's at least possible to talk about why there are so few women in CS without producing these effects. Without knowing any more about this course than what you've said here, it's hard to say whether it's an honest attempt to ask the question, or a vehicle for someone to push a particular point of view, but why buttume the latter?

Huh?

I think any reasonable alert student would notice that the overwhelming majority of students in CS-major clbuttes are male. Where I teach, the proportion of male to female students runs about 5 to 1, and from what I hear from other educators, this is fairly standard. So asking "why are there so few women in CS?" is not calling attention to anything they haven't already noticed.

I can imagine the ensuing discussion going in directions you wouldn't like, and maybe I wouldn't either, but I can also imagine it encouraging students to examine their buttumptions, and think about what statistics mean, and other stuff that would be good for freshmen to do. Maybe I'm not being cynical enough about how things really work in most college clbuttes, though ....

Which is too bad, because that will make it more difficult to find out whether it *is* idiocy ....

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