
What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science? - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/business/16digi.html
======
alaithea
I am a woman who has been programming professionally, on and off, for about 9
years, and full-time at a corporate job for two and a half of those. I was the
first woman to be hired as a software developer at my workplace in almost 25
years. I hate my job, and next fall, I will enter grad school to go into an
allied health profession. My reasons for leaving full-time software
development are as follows:

1) The social interaction leaves something to be desired at my job, especially
if you are not into gaming or D&D. There are few coworkers with whom I can
discuss non-geek topics such as travel or food. This is probably due, at least
in part, to having so few women around. The guys constantly revel in their
geekitude. It gets old.

2) The work itself is isolating. I love to code, but especially during the
long, depressing months of winter, I long for meetings to go to, or phone
calls to receive.

3) Similar to the last point: I'd like to have a reason to leave my desk
several times a day, for periods longer than it takes to get a cup of coffee
or go to the bathroom. The highly sedentary nature of the job starts to make
it feel like a prison.

In contrast to the last couple of points, my male coworkers act as though they
would be happy if they never had to leave their desk chair to go to another
meeting. Maybe this is just personality, and not a gender difference. Maybe I
don't love programming enough to lose myself in it for hours at a time. I
think some of these things, however, especially the social issues, may be
indicative of basic female needs to have a connection with others, a feeling
of being nurtured (and nurturing others), and good (female) role models. It
would be interesting to see a workplace in which the majority of developers
are women.

I recall reading about a study recently in which they found that men tended to
concentrate in the hard sciences (math, physics), where women preferred
sciences with a human aspect (psychology, biology). I believe they found that
even women who had entered the hard sciences often ended up leaving them for
fields with a more human touch.

~~~
blackguardx
I am a man and I feel the same way. I recently graduated and have been working
as a hardware designer for the past year and a half. I find cube life very
depressing and am increasingly losing my motivation.

I have better social interaction, though. My work has people who are hard to
converse with because of their lack of social skills but the majority of
people aren't like that.

Even though I hate sitting in my cubicle all day, I really don't like most
meetings because the information discussed isn't interesting and my eyes glaze
over. People get into pointless arguments and I sit there hoping for the
meeting to end. The only meetings that I like are design meetings, but most of
our meetings just cover status updates.

I yearn for a job that doesn't involve sitting in front of a computer all day.
I love hardware design and programming, but 8 hours a day of it is very
taxing. I suffer from RSI in my wrists and have yet to find a long lasting
remedy.

Maybe the best option would be to start my own hardware or software company.
Working for someone else just adds to the dreariness. Other than that, I have
been thinking about becoming a doctor.

~~~
alaithea
Your point about starting a business is a good one. I initially learned
programming while self-employed as a web designer back in the wee days of the
web. On my own, I always wore more hats than just "code monkey," and that made
a difference. Not to mention that when you're self-employed, you can go take a
walk outdoors, etc., anytime you like. I guess a predilection for self-
employment is why most of us are here reading Hacker News.

At risk of going off-topic: I, too, suffer from RSI. As a programmer and
musician, it is a double whammy for me. I have found many short-term
solutions, but have recently experienced some astonishing relief from reading
The Mindbody Prescription by Dr. Sarno (I believe someone here on HN mentioned
it). If you think you would be open to the idea of RSI as a disorder
originating in the brain as a result of buried emotional tension, you should
check it out.

------
iigs
It's a bit presumptive to call men the reference case and to ask what's wrong
with {universities, women} that has caused a drop in female enrollment. Maybe
a better question is: Why are there so many _men_ in computer science.

The article's author doesn't seem to really make an effort to figure out what
happened, other than to reference one individual who went into health care.

I think exploring this question to its fullest would require dropping some
politically correct guards and questioning quite a few gender assumptions,
something that neither web forums nor national newspapers are particularly
good forums for.

~~~
ken
Yep. You'd need somebody with absolutely no shame ... like Phil Greenspun!

<http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/acm-women-in-computing>
<http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

"[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with
less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD."

"A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that
they've made a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in
the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have
chosen to stick with the choice that they made at age 18"

~~~
nandemo
"[A]nyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with
less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD."

This is odd for at least 2 reasons: 1) It's really hard to believe that
getting a MD is "less work and risk" than getting a degree in CS. 2) At least
in my country, most people who are interested in CS or engineering wouldn't
even consider becoming doctors. It's not about money.

------
jerf
Personally, after all the efforts of the past couple of decades to get women
involved in college have succeeded to the point that women now make up the
majority of college students (with the trends continuing to favor even more
women for the forseeable future), if computer science is actually still
_dropping_ , the possibility that it is simply an outlier must be taken
seriously.

If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a
profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of
everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender
ratios will be normally distributed. So, I mean outlier in the technical sense
of a statistical distribution. There _will_ be extremes at one end or another,
and the mere fact of their existence is testimony that gender differences of a
statistical nature do indeed exist, not proof that there is some other factor.
If we actually got all professions to strict 50/50 proportions, that would be
proof positive of major meddling.

I mean that first paragraph seriously. In the absence of such efforts,
discrimination of some form would be a plausible hypothesis, but given how
many other fields have overcome this and the dominant culture of universities,
I find it increasingly difficult to believe the members of the field are
really the problem. Computer scientists can hardly be blamed for a culture
that considers them nerds and tells girls they shouldn't be nerds, if that is
the root problem. (Nor will the obvious solutions work; protesting that you
aren't really nerds is not a good approach. Making tons of money was a
reasonably effective approach, though that has lost its apparent
inevitability. :) )

~~~
SamReidHughes
> If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses
> a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of
> everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the
> gender ratios will be normally distributed.

I don't see any reason why they would be normally distributed. Their weighted
average would be the general gender proportion among students, but there's
nothing that says or implies the distribution would be normal. One could
imagine an extremely different scenario, a species with every field being
populated entirely by one gender, and one could imagine a species where a few
fields (say, engineering fields) are strongly preferred by one gender while
the rest are equally preferred among non-engineering students. There's no
reason why the human species is one where these ratios are distributed
normally. And if it were, it would be entirely by coincidence.

~~~
jerf
> I don't see any reason why they would be normally distributed.

The odds of the Central Limit Theorem failing to apply here seem
extraordinarily low. I am one of the people who think it tends to be
overapplied, but this is exactly the sort of scenario where it applies very
strongly.

Speculating about species with alternative gender breakdowns with non-normal
distributions has no effect on the fact that in humans our gender differences
are very much normally distributed in almost every way relevant to the
discussion of what career one would choose. Yes, such a species is
biologically plausible, but what is, is.

~~~
SamReidHughes
And how does the central limit theorem apply here?

~~~
jerf
Rather than one factor deciding whether a given profession will trend male or
female, it seem far more likely it will be a number of factors. I don't even
have to lay them out, just assert that the alternative (there is precisely one
factor that determines the gender composition of a given profession) seems
almost incomprehensibly improbable. The burden of proof would really be on
somebody making the alternative claim since nothing in the real world works
that way.

Once you have that, you have some gender distribution of such traits, and even
if that gender distribution itself isn't normally distributed (and most gender
differences do have that distribution, with different averages and standard
deviations for the two genders but broadly normal in both senses), the CLT
says that the resulting distribution will be normal.

Digging into the math of the CLT shows the result to be relatively robust,
too, as you add more and more factors into the mix. Eventually, with many
factors (such as comes up when talking about anything human), you end up with
a powerful pull towards the normal distribution that requires some
pathological distribution to avoid.

Taleb's "Black Swan" theory, glibly paraphrasing, says that there are more
such distributions than people realize, especially when you start using the
CLT to gloss over pathological cases that arise in the real world. However, I
don't think any such pathology exists today, and the pathology usually claimed
("systematic discrimination") was a lot more plausible before the events of
the past 20 years, such as I described in my original post. (The "very strong"
force is not something like "the dudes in my comp sci 101 class keep trying to
pick me up", it would be more like "women in comp sci classes get death
threats" at a minimum. The CLT can be overcome but it takes a _lot_ as you
start adding more distributions into the mix.)

To claim that this distribution would not be normal and therefore there should
not be outliers would require demonstrating why all of the psychology
research, which tends to show normal distributions of all kinds of traits in
humanity, is either wrong, or all those normal distributions don't apply to
the choice of career path. I don't think this is likely, as the most
popular/reasonably explanation of the latter seems to me to be counter to the
evidence.

This is a post on a social site; to go beyond this would probably require
significant research, assigning numbers, etc. I _know_ I'm handwaving some
here, because this just isn't the place to do a full explanation of the CLT,
after all. If you're more interested in this subject, I'd have to refer you to
a statistics book and some time with a calculator. (I'm serious about that
calculator bit, by the way; I have found it's easy to be able to spit out lots
of theory without the first clue how it really manifests in the real world. I
once did a programming project with Bayesian probabilities, and I found that
even though I already knew the theory fairly well, once I actually started
testing and computing Bayesian results _en masse_ , I found my intuition was
surprisingly poor. The CLT is the same way; you'll be surprised how quickly
adding just three or four random variables together gets you to something
fairly normal, and how much pathology it takes to prevent that result.)

~~~
SamReidHughes
Ok. Thanks for that explanation.

------
Zev
I wonder what the impact of having an article that goes "Why aren't women
interested in Computer Science" every other month has on this sort of thing..

------
yummyfajitas
Statistics FAIL.

>Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical
pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the
percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51
percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85,

Women have achieved "broad parity" in one other science and engineering field:
biology (pre-med). This accounts for a large number of _bachelors degrees in
science_ , but it does not account for a large number of _technical pursuits_.

(Actually, women also make up a largish chunk of math majors at schools which
don't offer math education as a separate degree. )

CS looks a lot like most other _math heavy_ science fields, like physics,
electrical/mechanical engineering and operations research.

------
jleyank
I have read that those who might do well in computer science choose a
different field for their success. Face it, it's not the most financially
rewarding career and the hours are probably worse than anything but Ob/Gyn
professionals. Toss some "gender biases" (for lack of a better word) into the
mix and it's no wonder why there's an estrogen shortage in the field.

~~~
vaksel
don't forget the constant need to refresh your skills. Pretty much any other
job requires no refreshes, and the few that do have refreshes that basically
involve a 3 hour seminar. Computer Science you gotta be on the cutting edge of
technology all the time.

And unlike other fields where you basically take a 3 hour seminar to get up to
speed, learning a new programming language takes a ton more time.

And like you said, its really not that much more financially rewarding than
other fields

~~~
llimllib
> Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes

You mean to tell me that being a doctor requires less continuing education
than CS? Really? You sure you can back that up?

~~~
blackguardx
Doctors are required to go through a certain number of Continuing Medical
Education (CME) courses each year to keep their board certification. Many of
these courses are in sunny vacation spots such as Hawaii, San Diego, etc.
Depending on the seminar, some doctors go for a few minutes to get credit and
then go golfing.

That being said, many doctors routinely read journal articles on the latest
advances in medicine. I would venture that not as many engineers read IEEE
articles. Still, there are many trade publications targeted towards engineers
that seem to do a good job of keeping them up to speed.

Arguing over who spends more time keeping up to date is pointless.

~~~
llimllib
> Arguing over who spends more time keeping up to date is pointless.

Agreed! but that wasn't what vaksel was arguing. He argued that CS requires
"constant refreshes", unlike "pretty much any other job".

I'm simply arguing that the medical field, at least, requires just as much
"refreshing" of skill as CS does.

(re the specific example of doctors, the niceness of the places where they get
certified is utterly irrelevant, as indeed are generally their certifications.
It requires a lot of continuing education to be a doctor, and it also requires
a lot of expensive, worthless certifications.)

------
ryanwaggoner
Math.

j/k :-)

------
time_management
I think it boils down to a couple of factors: (1) women, understandably,
loathe asking men for permission to do things, and (2) if they want to have
children, they can't take nearly as many risks in their early years.

Item 1 essentially rules out mainstream corporate environments, which are
still the nasty, vulgar, dumb white boy's world they've been for centuries. It
also makes VC-backed startups uncompelling, because although startup engineers
and VCs are more refined than mainstream corporates, VCs are still mostly men.

Moreover, most people want to have children, and while men who want to have
kids can wait until their 50s, women can't. This means that men can take more
risks when they're young, and it's why, for example, academia is unappealing:
it's a career where you need someone's permission (tenure) to start your adult
life, and usually don't get it until your late 30s.

A lot of the very-smart women who would be entering computer science choose,
instead, to become doctors, because medicine's a much better career from this
perspective. 1. The risk is low. 2. If you're good, you don't have to ask
anyone for permission. (This isn't true in tech; you still need VC.) 3. You
have pretty much free rein over whether or not you want to be rich and work
long hours, or moderately wealthy with a relaxed work schedule.

~~~
dgabriel
Uh, maybe, but as a female software engineer, I can tell you I'm doing ok on
the cusp of my thirties with one kid & two more currently baking. I have my
labor-of-love python project on the side, which may or may not ever get
backing, and another startup I'm working on with my partner. If I don't get
around to launching a company until I'm 40, that's cool, too.

However, as far as the attitudes of men, particularly men without families, or
with families they have completely foisted off onto their wives, you are
correct about the nasty, dumb, vulgar stuff.

------
syntax-case
"How do you write women so well?" ...

------
viggity
obviously, the cause is men and their evil penises of death!

~~~
Hexstream
Or their inappropriate phallic references, perhaps.

