
Harvey Mudd College: Increasing women in CS from 10 to 40% in 5 years - bootload
https://backchannel.com/at-harvey-mudd-college-the-ratio-of-women-in-cs-increased-from-10-to-40-in-5-years-4bb72e909fbd
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tracker1
My only concern when I see things like this, is I really don't want to see
better gender equality at the expense of reverse-discrimination, or for
programs that are only for one role|race|gender. It's one thing to try to
balance out, it's another to create a situation of intolerance.

My younger brother had a teacher (5th grade, about 20 years ago now), that
openly said that boys in her class would average one grade score below girls
in the class. Thing like that just aren't right, and don't serve to improve a
situation.

As it stands there are significantly more women than men involved in post high
school education. Right, fair and equal are not always the same thing... but
_just_ should be.

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H0n3sty
TL;DR

1\. split intro course into one class for students with no prior programming
experience and one for students with prior experience.

2\. send about 65, including 25 first year, female students to a conference
geared towards women in technology.

3\. encourage female students to apply for early research opportunities.

4\. match female computer scientist mentors with female students.

Interesting comment in original article: _So to summarize you use special
treatment to remedy a gender imbalance because you feel better if you have an
equal number of male and female students in any given major. What majors have
more women than men and what is being done to remedy those?_

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harry8
The lack of women in any CS program is a symptom and indicates a problem that
is wider than mere gender (or race or whatever obvious demogoraphic category
you have). Harvey Mudd appear to have a desire to fix the actual problem,
which is people who would do very well to go with CS being discouraged. As
long as what anyone does to address demographic imbalance goes to the root
cause and is not just a whole load of symptom masking I'm all for it. If
$minority aren't present you can bet that there are also a bunch of white guys
who would be really good at CS, better than the incumbents perhaps, who have
also been discouraged because they're shy, are intimidated by those who loudly
know 1% more at the start of the course or whatever it is. Just as there would
be any other demographic group. In fixing that problem of discouraging the
best talent the quality of their CS grads in terms of what they are able to
get done, what novel insights they have should improve. The students should
push the academics harder and make the CS program stronger. Will that happen?
I hope so but we'll see. I don't know more than this blog post.

The disaster would be if symptoms of the disease were masked and the manner in
which they are masked means the grads have learned less. (Eg finding the
subject matter is too intimidating so dumbing it down as a response.)

Anytime you have a narrow demographic dominating a field it's symptom telling
there's a problem but it tells you exactly nothing about what the true nature
of the problem is. You have to do a bunch of additional work to find out if
it's because of hostility to "outsiders", poor preparation earlier in
education, societal cultural discouragement or if the field has no
intellectual merit and is largely a con that has taken hold of a particular
demographic or any one of a million other causes. Treating a demographic
imbalance as the problem itself is crazy - the disease, whatever it is, will
persist and be harder to track.

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nkurz
I wonder how the faculty male/female ratio impacts the student ratio. Here's
Harvey Mudd's CS Department:

[https://www.cs.hmc.edu/people/](https://www.cs.hmc.edu/people/)

It lists 15 Faculty: 9 Male, 6 Female.

Interestingly, 6/15 also equals 40%.

How does Harvey Mudd's ratio compare to other schools? I'm guessing most CS
departments are more male dominated, but don't know for sure.

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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182080)

