
How Carnegie Mellon Increased the Proportion of Women in Computer Science - junelin
http://www.hackingplay.com/carnegie-mellon-study-on-gender-and-computer-science
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aroch

         A more inclusive admissions process
    

Isn't this basically saying "we're admitting more, less qualified females and
fewer more qualified (relatively) males". I see this all the time in STEM
related admissions and I'm not sure I like it. I'm for encouraging women in
STEM and I love that lab culture is much more open and welcoming of women
nowadays (of the programs I work with, many of them have >60% women) but there
does come a point where we've built a whole new level of institutional
discrimination. I know of many well qualified male applicants that were denied
to make room for substantially less qualified female applicants all in the
name of "equality". It's not equality if you're elevating one gender to
artificially make things "equal" on paper.

~~~
rayiner
You're presupposing that whatever admissions standard existed before was
"neutral" and any deviation from that involves discrimination. But consider
the specific changes made:

"In the past, admissions gave preference to people with lots of previous
programming experience. The new criteria focused on potential by targeting
students who showed science and math aptitude as well as non-academic
strengths like leadership. The department made it explicit that no prior
experience was required."

None of these measures seem to me to discriminate against men. Also, the
enrollment gender ratio of 40-60 isn't that far off from the representation of
women and men among high school students who score 750 on the SAT Math (CMU's
interquartiles for SAT Math are 690-790), which is roughly 35-65.

MIT's experience evening out its gender ratio is illustrative. Unfortunately I
can't find the link right now, but MIT found sometime in the 1990's that women
were outperforming their admission predictors, based heavily on SAT scores,
relative to men. So they rebalanced their admissions process to put less
emphasis on SAT scores and more emphasis on high school GPAs.

Also, "equality" here is a more complex issue than you're making it out to be.
Social conventions are self-perpetuating. You can't just remove the overt
discrimination and assume things will shift back to a healthy equilibrium.
Once you have bent a metal beam outside the elastic region you can't just
remove the external force and wait for it to straighten itself out!
Illustrative here is the legal industry's experience with fairly aggressive
affirmative action for women in the 1970's and 1980's. Law firms went from
being 95% men to being almost even, and that new equilibrium was self-
perpetuating. The ratio stayed roughly equal even after the measures were
phased out.

~~~
yock
_You 're presupposing that whatever admissions standard existed before was
"neutral" and any deviation from that involves discrimination._

No he isn't. The question is whether or not merit is the ultimate criteria for
admissions. If gender is to be elevated above merit, all we've done is
exchanged one form of discrimination for another.

We should be constantly scrutinizing how we judge merit and filter out
discriminatory practices. The danger is of course that this is very hard, and
it's much easier to weight our decisions in favor of those who have been
discriminated against rather than strive for getting the judgement correct. To
my heart, this is worse than the original inequality.

~~~
rayiner
> The question is whether or not merit is the ultimate criteria for admissions

Again, you're begging the question. You're assuming that the original
admission process measured "merit" in the first place. To me the original
process measured exposure (people who had been exposed to programming before),
not merit. The new process seems more meritorious if anything else (focusing
more on people with general aptitude).

> The danger is of course that this is very hard, and it's much easier to
> weight our decisions in favor of those who have been discriminated against
> rather than strive for getting the judgement correct. To my heart, this is
> worse than the original inequality.

No, it's not. It's not worse for a small number of marginal male candidates to
be denied admission as a side-effect of a larger effort to counteract the
impact of centuries of discrimination against women. Not even close. Not even
a little bit. Not on any day of the week.

The fact that a few workers might get killed doesn't stop you from building
the skyscraper...

~~~
lliamander
> Again, you're begging the question. You're assuming that the original
> admission process measured "merit" in the first place.

He (that is, yock) did not beg the question. I quote "If gender is to be
elevated above merit, all we've done is exchanged one form of discrimination
for another". Perhaps the old policy favored prior exposure in contrast to
merit; now the new policy favors gender over merit. Perhaps aroch is assuming
that the original process was merit based, but yock's argument in no way
reflects or depends upon such an assumption.

>No, it's not. It's not worse for a small number of marginal male candidates
to be denied admission as a side-effect of a larger effort to counteract the
impact of centuries of discrimination against women. Not even close. Not even
a little bit. Not on any day of the week.

The root of the problem, at least as far as I understand the Feminist Movement
to be saying, is that an attitude of discrimination based upon factors which
aren't inherently relevant to the issue at hand (such as choosing not to serve
someone food just because of their skin color) is wrong, regardless of any
history of transgressions.Vengeance is not justice. Besides, we don't actually
know the net number of people who are unfairly (i.e. for reasons other than
merit) prevented from entering CS as a result of this policy change.

> The fact that a few workers might get killed doesn't stop you from building
> the skyscraper...

While not an unreasonable analogy regarding the trade-offs and risks of
progress, it is not the most flattering of you. More than a few movie plots
have villains who take more or less the same attitude. Of course, they were
less scrupulous about prevent unnecessary worker deaths, especially when they
"had it coming"... Full Disclosure: I worked at a plywood mill that, in the
past, suffered a few too many workers deaths until the workers formed a union
and OSHA stepped in.

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circuiter
Does anyone know what are the 'serious consequences' we face if there aren't
as many women studying computer science as men?

The male-domination unfortunately persisted since 2000 but the industry has
still grown leaps and bounds beyond anyone's imagination. So what seems to be
the problem?

~~~
nck4222
The industry has grown, that doesn't mean it can't be improved.

I'm not sure where the term "serious consequences" came from, but I think it's
pretty straight forward that a group comprised of similar individuals will
come up with similar ideas. More women, means more diversity, which means
differing ideas, which means more innovation.

Silicon Valley is already referred to as echo chamber.

~~~
NegativeK
IT exhibits behaviors that are hostile to (approximately, or at least) 51% of
potential employees. Talk about excluding talent and insight.

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newobj
When I went to CMU, there were allegedly more "Dave"s than women in SCS.

~~~
saucetenuto
That was only in one particular year IIRC.

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Prophasi
The question that arises for me is how the changes affected the performance of
the department, however that's measured (e.g. entrepreneurs, investment,
placement, grants, average graduate salaries, etc.).

The outcome, good or bad, wouldn't necessarily reflect on the changed
proportion of women; it might just as well indicate something about the
particular measures they took to achieve it. For instance, they shifted focus
more to potential than to prior experience; were their markers for potential
the right ones? Were leadership, math, and science emphases balanced properly?

Getting more women into the program is a great start, but do they go on to be
successful? Is leading with gender the right way to do it?

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hga
I wish the author would "do the math": of the 42% female freshman class of
2004 entering in 2000 (which at CMU for this major requires a direct
application for one of 135 (last time I checked) seats), 29% failed to
graduate in the major within 4 years.

Now, that might be partly an artifact of the dot com crash convincing a subset
to transfer to another major, but it otherwise looks _very_ bad; if that
happened at MIT for any reason other than transferring out (which I can check
on if desired, the department _did_ lose more than half its enrollment during
this period as measured by freshman declaring a major), there would be serious
hell to pay.

~~~
eevee
Or a lot of men transferred/changed majors _into_ CS, whereas very few women
did—which wouldn't be too surprising since the outreach was aimed at freshmen.

Definitely an oversight in the article either way.

~~~
hga
I get the strong impression from many sources that transferring into that
department is very hard, just like it has its own admissions process (unique
among the top 4 CS schools (Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU and MIT)).

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galapago
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_discrimination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_discrimination)

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jsnk
HN ddos seems to be at work.

Here is the cached version.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TGYuw9a...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TGYuw9a2Ij4J:www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

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xutopia
Awesome work! I wonder if the effect will be long lasting.

