

Of Geeks and Girls - araneae
http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html

======
msluyter
I'd like to play devil's advocate[1] for a second: why is the lack of women in
CS a problem? Whatever the merit of all these explanations -- it's perceived
as dorky, low status, overly masculine, etc... -- the one thing I _don't_ see
is a strong desire amongst women to be in the field. It'd be one thing if
there were barriers like overt sexism (and perhaps there are), or if you often
heard the refrain, "you know, I'd really like to be a computer programmer, but
I can't because of XYZ..." AFAICT, the real culprit here appears to be self-
selection.

Assuming that's the case, who cares? Why all the hand wringing? One downside I
see is the lack of a "woman's perspective," which, while admittedly important
in many fields, seems mostly irrelevant in a field where stuff either works or
it doesn't. The other is a lack of interest in the field overall, but it seems
a constant source of debate (see any H1B visa thread) as to whether we have a
shortage or a glut of qualified workers.

[1] This shouldn't be read as a position I'm strongly committed to.

EDIT: Criticisms of this post thus far are mostly along the lines of a) a
woman's perspective matters more than I give it credit for and b) "works or
doesn't" is too simplistic. Fair enough. I admit my argument wasn't
particularly nuanced (purposefully), hence the "devil's advocate" label.
Questions I would ask are: wrt point a), is this something we can empirically
validate? Or should we just assume any gender imbalance is inherently
problematic? I'm not necessarily against the latter view, but I'd like to see
it addressed explicitly.

~~~
zck
The lack of women in CS is a problem because the CS field is missing out.
There are a whole lot of intelligent women that could make important
breakthroughs. The field is slowed because half the population is discouraged
from joining it.

~~~
geebee
I agree, but there's a second half that people need to consider. CS is missing
out on women, but are women missing out on CS?

To paraphrase Phil Greenspun (from the "women in science" essay), we need to
ask if CS "is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is
privileged enough to work at it?"

CS at a reputable university is hard. Seriously, seriously hard. I have no
doubt that people who can handle this can also handle the academic rigor of a
bio major followed by med school, and they sure as hell can handle an econ
major followed by an MBA, or sociology major followed by law school.

So I'd start by asking: what are the women who are able to do CS doing
instead, and would it be in their better interest to stop doing that and study
CS?

~~~
elblanco
>but are women missing out on CS?

This, I think is the central problem. It seems that most of the really really
intelligent women I know have gone into other fields than CS because that's
where their interests lie. CS simply wasn't a fulfillment of their interests
not some more nefarious discrimination problem.

------
barrkel
Gah! The article contains yet another misrepresentation of what Lawrence
Summers said:

> _former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested that men are
> hard-wired to be more analytical than women_

What he said was that there was more variance in IQ in males than in females,
thus there are both more stupid males and more intelligent males - there are
more males at either ends of the spectrum. Given a filter for extra-high IQ,
you would then expect that there would be more males in that sample.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Minor nit: what Larry Summers said is that there _might be_ more variance and
it was worthy of study. He never drew any conclusion.

~~~
dhimes
Exactly. In fact, I wasn't convinced that he actually considered it anything
more than speculation, but brought the point up in a very academic, even
devil's advocate, way.

~~~
btilly
Given the evidence that already exists, I would be surprised if he considered
the idea _just_ speculation.

The fact that men have a greater variance in ability than women has been
repeatedly confirmed. Depending on which characteristic of intelligence is
being measured, the variance among men is generally 1.07 to 1.17 times as
great as the variance among women. Vocabulary is an extreme, there the
variance is 1.4 times greater among men than women. See
[http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3238/version/1/files/...](http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3238/version/1/files/npre20093238-1.pdf)
for verification of that.

The open and difficult question is how much of the over-representation of men
at the top echelons of society can be attributed to this variation of ability
versus sexism. While the question is going to offend and be controversial, I
agree with Summers that the principle of academic freedom says that academics
should be free to ask it.

------
yummyfajitas
I'm very surprised to see feminists studying the 'Roissy' [1] theory of female
career choices.

In short, the theory is that women are extremely intolerant of low status men
and try to avoid working in fields where they are prevalent, and particularly
in fields where they are respected. It actually has a reasonable amount of
predictive power, certainly more than the sexism theory.

I'll be blown away, however, if we actually follow the theory to it's logical
conclusion...

[1] Roissy in DC is an extremely sexist, but insightful blogger. He didn't
state this theory, but I've heard it described as the 'Roissy' theory since it
follows his line of thinking.

~~~
scott_s
That theory is not the one explored in the studies described. The theory was
that the women perceived the environment to be unwelcoming.

~~~
yummyfajitas
They found that women are turned off by an environment which suggests “nerdy,
techie, stay up late coding, energy drinks, no social life.… They don't
frequently take showers.”

 _...if she had asked them to describe any other group, like black people or
women, they would have refused to answer. “But describe computer science
majors? No problem!” she says with a laugh_

The article is caged in PC language, but it's describing nothing but
intolerance of a certain group of people.

You'll note that the theory of the unwelcoming environment is easy to debunk;
if true, then law and medicine should also have very few women (they were
historically unwelcoming to women). Yet somehow, those fields (full of high
status men) are now about 50% women.

~~~
scott_s
Law and medicine also have large monetary and status incentives. I can imagine
walking into certain kinds of offices and feeling like I would not want to
work there. I do not consider that intolerance.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Good point; a complementary theory would be that women wish to obtain high
status for themselves, and the perception that CS is low status turns them
off. I don't see how we could distinguish between your theory and the 'Roissy
theory', so it is equally valid.

As for intolerance, I'm not sure how we could consider your unwillingness to
tolerate certain kinds of offices as anything other than intolerance.

~~~
scott_s
Scratch off women and just say: "some people wish to obtain high status for
themselves." Some people aren't as concerned with status - it's not that they
don't care, but they're not willing to put up with as much crap to gain it.
(Doctors and lawyers certainly put up with a lot of crap for their perceived
status.) If we further assume there is an occupation with middle status, but
has nontrivial social barriers to a certain group, then there's not much
incentive for that group to break in when there are plenty of other
occupations with the same status.

The differences between what I said and what you said: mine could apply to any
group, not just women, and I'm assuming that only a smaller subset of most
people are willing to pursue high social status despite the extra burdens;
most people are fine with middle status.

Also, intolerance of an environment is different than intolerance of a group
of people.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The article suggests that women are turned off by the perception of low status
to a greater extent than men.

Regarding middle status jobs, there are plenty of formerly male-dominated
middle status jobs which women have successfully broken into, e.g. advertising
(c.f. Mad Men).

Any explanation of why women do not enter math/phys/CS must come up with
something that distinguishes math/phys/CS from those other fields. Being a
"middle status job" doesn't do it, nor does initial unfriendliness. I'd
suggest that one possible explanation is that "geeky" pursuits are actually
_lower status_ than most comparable office jobs, and more women than men are
turned off by low status.

~~~
scott_s
I guess we'll just have to disagree; I saw no indications of status in the
article. All I saw were perceptions of the environment.

------
jff
Here's some anecdotal info that bothered me when I saw it. I've graded several
CS 1 courses and found that out of the class of 20-30, there might be 2 or 3
women, tops. Fine and good, since my school's engineering dept is 87% male and
the CS dept is 92% male. However, the thing I noticed was that too many of
these girls did poorly in the first few weeks and frequently dropped the
course altogether; I'm not sure what they did then, since you can't really do
any CS/IT/SE/CE degree without CS 1. Of the guys, maybe 1 or 2 would drop.

Why does this happen? My school _is_ trying hard to get more women in CS and
engineering fields, which may mean poorly-qualified girls are being accepted
and pushed into these degrees; are we just a statistical anomaly? The numbers
in the article would seem to indicate otherwise. Anyone else have insights
from their own grading/teaching experiences?

Oh, and regarding pair programming, it's the best possible way to make sure
you won't want to see your friend's face for another week, because half the
time one of you will want to do something the other one just doesn't "get", so
you sit there and explain it repeatedly when you could have just implemented
it by yourself, all the while watching your teammate type with a speed and
error frequency generally associated with senile chimpanzees.

~~~
araneae
The comment above you (well right now) indicates that women are less
experienced coming into introductory classes. It makes sense that they'll have
a higher failure rate, as it's difficult to compete against people who know
more than you.

~~~
dkarl
In my experience, they're not only less experienced, but they're continuously
falling further behind in experience, at least for the first couple of years.
They try to approach the first couple of years of CS the same way you treat
the first couple of years of any other major, like math or biology: read the
assigned reading, master the concepts, do the homework, and study for the
tests. Take a lot of other interesting courses, and spend the first year (or
two) deciding whether to major in CS or History or maybe Religion with a pre-
law emphasis. Then, as a junior, start thinking about a substantial senior
project that will introduce you to practical work. Just like any other college
kid.

But that just doesn't work in CS, not at most schools. The curriculum is
designed for the average (or slightly below average) student, who already has
some programming experience and OS knowledge and who is actively engaged in
acquiring more experience and more savoir faire. An intelligent person with no
experience can catch up, but only by focusing hard on CS and putting in a lot
of extra work to catch up with the other students.

Is there any point in accommodating anyone else besides the lifelong hobby
hackers and the focused enthusiasts? I think this is an important question.
From a competitive standpoint, there's clearly no point. There are plenty of
hard-core geeks, and it seems intuitively obvious that the curriculum can be
more advanced and interesting if you take the students' strengths for granted.
Washing out everyone else means you can produce graduates who are more deeply
knowledgeable about computing and who are better equipped to be productive in
typical industry jobs.

On the other hand, it homogenizes the field and bakes in the personal
peculiarities -- positive and negative -- of the kinds of people who get
deeply interested in computers as teenagers.

Obviously the PC answer (as well as the "big picture, good of society" answer)
is to accommodate as wide a range of people as possible. At selective
universities that is probably feasible, and if feasible, is the right answer.
However, I got my degree in a non-CS field and only took CS classes when I was
unemployed for a while early in my career. I took those classes at a community
college and at a night extension of a crappy state school. In those classes,
it was clear that some of the the geek/hobbyist students had a chance of being
decently productive at industry jobs, but the students who had not done any
hobby programming, whose only knowledge came from the curriculum, were
completely hopeless. It was obvious they would never be competent enough to
contribute in any industry job unless their primary competence was something
other than computer science. For vocational training, I think it's unrealistic
to encourage these "lightweights" to pursue a degree in computer science,
because they'll never achieve a useful level of competence. You might as well
wash them out and focus on the lifelong geeks, who at least can become
competent coders or QA guys.

~~~
araneae
This is exactly the reason why most folks will never program; not because they
don't have the capability to be competent, but because we have this odd
culture _around_ programming. There's this belief that CS is something that
you have to start when you're young and be obsessed with your whole life to
even do.

In any field- math, bio, art, music, the people who are _best_ at it are those
types- the start-early would-do-it-for-free types. But there's a whole lot of
people milling around who could be second best. In other fields, being second
best or not that into it is acceptable.

In computer science it's not. And more importantly, because programming and
computer science are often equated, this prevents a whole lot of people from
programming.

And who needs to program? I'd argue that the time is past where only computer
scientists need to program. Everyone needs to program; biologists,
mathematicians, linguists, social scientists... (maybe not the English majors,
but w/e) and this idea that programming can only be done by people that
started when they were 5 year old boys is a huge loss.

------
ErrantX
The problem I have with this sort of research is that I think it makes too
much of the "because your female you dont like that sort of stuff" myth.

Im a guy, I love all things tech (and am a bit geeky about it). However I
never liked Star Trek and whilst I read Science Fiction / Fantasy the whole
D&D and more mainstream Warhammer type stuff makes me squirm. I imagine that
same room would put me off too; unless it had something cool in it (for
example a complex lego "star trek" model) that appealed to the engineer in me.

I know a fair few CS majors - most are men. But there are easily as many women
as hardcore star trek style geeks. Some of the most hardcore geeks are women.

I really think this is a lot more complex than star trek :)

~~~
jimbokun
I find it odd that you are appealing to your anecdotal experience, when they
had studies where the actually subjected actual women to these environments
and observed their reactions. Also, they quote some of the hardcore geek women
or which you speak, so I do not understand where you find yourself disagreeing
with the research or the article.

~~~
ErrantX
Firstly I cant see any information about who was tested etc. and how many. To
really refute it I would need to see that.

My main point was r.e. the Star Trek thing. I agree entirely that it might put
women off (as I said, it even puts me off) but I am not sure it is good
evidence that this is how women [or anyone] perceive cs (and so puts them
off). The test doesn't cover that issue at all.

It's like saying "we did a study where we found all men were unable to breast
feed babies. As a result we conclude only women can get pregnant" :)

~~~
whatusername
Realise it's completely off-topic - but did you know that men actually can
breastfeed? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_lactation>

------
waynerad
This article misrepresent's Samuel Gosling's research. It says that Gosling's
experiments show that people can make "surprisingly accurate" assessments of
strangers by looking at their personal space. In fact Gosling's research shows
that people can form a more accurate assessment from a first impression (even
a still photo) than they can from looking at someone's personal space (such as
a bedroom or cubicle), and in fact people get many things wrong by looking at
someone's personal space. If you want to know exactly what you can and can't
tell about someone's personality from looking at their personal space, get his
book.

~~~
whimsy
You seem to be referencing this:
[http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/gosling/scal...](http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/gosling/scales_we.htm#Personal%20Living%20Space%20Cue%20Inventory)

Is that correct?

------
Tichy
From the article: “No matter what we do to that room, even if we make it all
female, women just don't feel like they belong there.”

Could it be that is is just computer science that many women don't feel
attracted to? The statement above seems to contradict her own research, and
she fails to see it. The stereotypes seem _really_ outdated, too.

Or maybe women just tend to be intolerant... _ducks_

~~~
memetichazard
How does it contradict the research? By 'no matter what we do', it doesn't
mean she's swapping out the geeky material for the magazines (which makes
women more comfortable, apparently), it means she's doing everything without
changing the requirement that the room needs to be filled with nerdy/geeky
material. The second part of the sentence reinforces the fact that even if
it's made clear that it will be an all-female room/team, they still feel
uncomfortable.

~~~
nixme
It's a poorly worded sentence. I felt it contradicted the research on first-
read as well. Since they specifically placed objects rated with high
masculinity in the room, the "even if we make it all female" sounds as if
doing the opposite doesn't help.

~~~
Tichy
Yes, I understood it like that - even if the decor is "female" women won't
like it. So I guess I misread it.

------
patrickgzill
Does the heavy-equipment industry have similar discussions?

"Hey, how come there aren't more wimmin running our Caterpillar D9s in the
Brazilian rainforest?"

Oh yeah, Philip Greenspun points out science is a dead end job for any
ambitious woman: <http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science>

~~~
sethg
You mean, like this?

<http://www.sistersinthebuildingtrades.org/>

If you go to the "About Us" → "Our Supporters" menu item, you see a list of
donations, and the majority of donors are labor unions.

~~~
patrickgzill
Donations for 2009 under $4k ; donations for 2008 under $15K ... sorry this is
not a significant organization.

~~~
sethg
It's not the only group of people interested in the subject of getting more
women involved in the traditionally-male building trades occupations. If you
want to find more on the subject, you can Google for it yourself.

------
srn
I like this article because it points out women are also geeky and that it's
OK to be geeky. Women just may tend to have a slightly different way of
expressing that geekiness.

You want girls to feel comfortable because you want the girls who are good at
CS to go into CS. This is independent of how many women go in total. But since
we're at it, let's talk about the biology arguments:

[http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/17/how-does-biology-
explain-...](http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/17/how-does-biology-explain-the-
low-numbers-of-women-in-somputer-science-hint-it-doesnt/)

<http://www.mun.ca/cwse/Cannon,Elizabeth.pdf>

according to the above study, undergraduate women in engineering showed
comparatively a higher interest in math than men though slightly lower
interest in engineering and yet lower interest in physics.

<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/>

Through additional work CMU increased their percentage of women in CS from 8%
to 1995 to 42% in 2000. One thing I recall is that women were not as
experienced when they first got into CS and had to work harder. However they
believed they had caught up by junior year.

~~~
orangecat
_But since we're at it, let's talk about the biology arguments_

The geekfeminism link addresses the almost-strawman argument that women don't
have the math or analytical skills needed for CS. It doesn't address the
possibility that there are biological reasons for differing levels of interest
in the field.

~~~
srn
Yes, the first link addresses a strawman but I bring it up because other
people still bring it up.

The second link discusses interests and influences for female undergrads
majoring in some kind of engineering, not CS, though I still think it is
somewhat relevant. I find the influence on family members to be the most
interesting.

The third link has papers specifically related to interest. One is titled "The
Anatomy of Interest." It discusses why women who started college enthusiastic
about CS ended up leaving.

------
mmt
_"I said, 'Where's my phone right now? It's over there, in my purse.' I
basically said, 'You're not designing your phones for women."'_

It startles me just how pervasive some stereotypes are.

The quoted assertion appears to depend on two generalizations. The first is
that women use purses instead of pockets , and the second is that they leave
purses "over there." The implied converse generalization is that men don't
leave their phone or its container "over there."

It makes me wonder if the inclusion of this quote was intentional
foreshadowing on the part of the author.

~~~
jlees
I've seen guys leave their phones in jacket pockets on the backs of chairs,
but that's way rarer than women not having a phone within arm's reach. To
generalise, of course, but pretty much every other woman I know uses a handbag
(purse) of some sort and won't always have it glued to their arm. Even I do,
occasionally -- skirts don't have pockets, y'know, and it's more comfortable
not having a giant iPhone in a tiny pocket. I used to be considered 'blokeish'
for not having a bag and keeping my cash/phone/keys in my jeans or coat
pocket. It's a fair enough generalisation in my experience.

~~~
ynniv
Bonus points for using the term 'blokeish'.

~~~
jlees
Er, at least in certain contexts, calling a woman blokeish is implying she's a
butch lesbian. I used to be a female computer scientist with a buzzcut (and
the pockets thing). Everyone thought I was gay.

(I'm not.)

~~~
ynniv
Certainly not implying that, just appreciating diverse vocabulary.

------
cadwag
The overall lesson to learn from the article is "Both men and women decide if
they belong in an environment based off cues from the environment itself."

That seems clear enough, but I started to think about how the lessons learned
here might be applied elsewhere. Namely, how could this lesson be applied to
help us, my fellow geek friends, out with the ladies?

Basically, what I'm saying is that if you want women to feel comfortable
around you and in your surrounding (ie home or office), then you have to
provide some cues to make them feel like they belong - barring that, at least
remove the cues that make them feel like they definitely don't.

I'm not saying redecorate your apartment with pink unicorns everywhere, but
maybe just start off small:

\- Replace the 1-foot-tall Yoda replica with a potted plant

\- Replace the wall of empty Mountain Dew cans with a bottle of water on your
desk

Like I said, just simple things to make any potential women that might see
your environment avoid the feeling that they "simply don't belong here."

I know the article isn't really about how to improve your odds with the
ladies, but I see no reasons not to apply the lessons they are learning with
actual research to other areas of our lives - especially one that our
demographic has historically had difficulty with.

For once we are getting info on how to make women feel more comfortable that
is backed by actual research as opposed to mere speculation and guesswork. Why
wouldn't we try to make use of that information in as many ways as possible?

------
pavelludiq
Heres some anecdotes for you. Im a guy, i gave up on programming for a while
because i perceived it as both boring and dry. I didn't want to work in a
cubicle, so i decided that maybe some of my other hobbies, like photography,
drawing or writing could become my career.

I knew i was a techie, I've grown up with dissembling stuff and figuring out
how stuff works and making stuff, its just that i didn't see programming the
same way i saw drawing in my notebook. I do now.

If there are women reading this, and you LOVE making stuff, don't let
stereotypes get in your way. If you don't like assholes don't work with them,
if you don't like cubicles don't work in them, if you don't like smelly
apartments with star trek posters on the wall, don't work there. Build your
own environment, find like minded individuals and MAKE THINGS. I don't know if
being a woman makes this harder, it probably does. Me, i can handle asshole
nerds and their smelly apartments(i am one), but i avoid dry and sterile
offices and bureaucracy as much as i can. Perhaps the extra effort isn't worth
it, if i couldn't work in an environment of my taste, i probably wouldn't be a
programmer, and be an artist instead, even though i SUCK as an artist a lot
more than i suck as a programmer, and i don't find it as much fun as i used to
when i sat bored in a classroom in high school.

------
ja27
There aren't very many women in CS because there aren't very many women in CS.

It's a "social norm" issue. How many girls deciding on college can look to a
woman in the field? How many of their friends are going on to major in CS? Or
will even tell them that it's a good idea?

It's similar to another question: Why aren't there more African-American
backpackers? The number I see tossed around a lot is that only 4% of
backpackers are African-American.

------
wushupork
quote: "She interviewed at Motorola, a cell phone company, and Adobe, a
graphic design company." - The person who wrote this article didn't even
bother researching the companies. Motorola does a heck of a lot more than just
cell phones. And saying Adobe is a graphic design company is like saying GE is
a refrigerator company.

------
jasongullickson
Since when does science have anything to do with anyone feeling "accepted"? I
just spent 12 minutes reading the dialog here and perhaps this post is a
result of an emotional response but seriously, most people I know involved in
computer science (that are any good) got there by persevering enormous social
discomfort. If you have a love and a passion for this work you will do it and
no amount of messy labs and Star Wars posters is going to change that.

Maybe I'm missing the point and correct me if I'm wrong, but allot of computer
science has already been created/invented/defined by women (the first
compiler, arguably the first programming language, etc.).

So if you have something to contribute, pull up a keyboard and start hacking;
computer science is one of the few arts/professions where today you need
little more than a computer and an internet connection to become as good as
your talent, creativity and willingness to invest the time will allow.

 _"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work."_ <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison>

------
gcheong
I would like to see a study that shows if the increase in women in other
science and engineering fields can be attributed to anything those fields
specifically did to attract more women or if it can be attributed to something
else entirely.

------
archon
I'm actually rather surprised that the researchers had as much luck as they
did (with either gender) in the "dentist office waiting room"-like
environment. I personally cringe every time I have to go to my dentist office,
precisely because I have to look at his horribly generic, lifeless waiting
room. At least the nerdy-gamer room had some personality.

Perhaps my feelings about generic, lifeless rooms are just atypical.

~~~
TheSOB88
They were expecting a class to be taught in it, so it wasn't the vile pit of
hour-long silent pastel neutrality.

------
Alex3917
The obvious followup is to try to figure out what it is about the Star Wars
posters and messy environment that makes women uncomfortable.

My guess is that women feel like they are biologically different than men, and
geek paraphernalia is seen as a signal that the environment will be dominated
by men who don't understand women. Any women here want to agree/disagree?

~~~
stjarnljuset
I had a pretty immediate negative reaction when I just read about the room
described. Now, I'm trying to figure out why I had this reaction.

I think the room communicates an environment of obsessive and messy people,
and that really isn't the kind of people I'd like to be around. I would have
felt better if it wasn't just Star Trek, but various posters of
stereotypically nerdy things. If it had been all posters of Harry Potter, I'd
still feel uncomfortable. Also, a life-size bust? Really? I would think a
life-size bust of anything to be weird, even if it was Zachary Quinto or
George Washington.

A messy environment does make me uncomfortable. (Does it not make you
uncomfortable?) The article described a mess of discarded computer parts. At a
past company that I worked for, I got to visit the IT room, which had neat
piles of spare computer parts organized in the middle of the floor. Although I
did think it was weird that the stuff was just lying on the floor, I did have
to resist an urge to crawl along the floor and check out everything (I totally
would've done it if the HR people weren't watching me). If it had been a
disorganized pile of discards, I wouldn't have given it a second glance.

> My guess is that women feel like they are biologically different than men

Um yes. I do feel that I am biologically different than men.

> and geek paraphernalia is seen as a signal that the environment will be
> dominated by men who don't understand women

Hmm, I think the closest place of "geek paraphernalia" that I've been exposed
to is my school's linux lounge. The place has a bunch of working computers and
some old computers to be stripped for parts, bookcases of CS textbooks,
posters of the Linux penguin, signs made of the reflective side of compact
discs, but there's nothing about this environment that turns me off. If the
room had instead been covered with something I had zero interest in (like Star
Trek) then yes, I would be a little put off.

~~~
Retric
_A messy environment does make me uncomfortable. (Does it not make you
uncomfortable?)_

A messy environment does not make me uncomfortable.

I wonder how much people’s dislike for disorder relates to the amount of time
they look for things. It seems like the people that keep the most ordered
desks spend the most time looking for things. However, I rarely need to find
physical stuff in my environment so it's just not that important to me.

~~~
stjarnljuset
Yes, but this isn't your mess, this is someone else's mess.

~~~
Retric
I am generalizing that your willingness to tolerate disorder in your personal
environment relates to your tolerance for a generic messy environment.

------
nzmsv
A question for all the male programmers here. Do you really think that the
single most important fact about you is your sex? I'm going to guess, no.

So why are we trying to lump 50% of the population together into one bucket?
There is no single unifying thing for every single woman out there. If there
is, it will be either:

a) something all (most) humans want, such as the desire to be respected, or

b) something the woman herself considers relatively insignificant

Guess what, CS will never appeal to "the generic woman", just like it won't
appeal to "the generic man". This is simply because they don't exist. This may
come as a surprise, but not all women like the color pink, or cooking. And I
personally don't understand the appeal of watching football on TV. Both my
wife and I enjoy our video game nights together though.

So, in conclusion, don't market CS "for girls". Market "CS for smart people
who want to make things". This is what's relevant, not gender.

------
elblanco
This is a problem I've personally never understood well. Of all fields, the CS
(I mean "software") field seems particularly eager to have female
representation. Women generally score well in math and logic tests, perform
well in school, etc. Anecdotally some of the better students in my CS
undergrad coursework were female. In some industries (e.g. gaming), getting
women into the development side of things would revolutionize the industries
by opening the market to 50% of the population by producing products that
cater to that demographic.

It just seems that fewer women enjoy doing the kinds of things you have to do
to be successful in this particular field than in some other.

That's not to say there aren't women who participate in the field, but I've
found, anecdotally, that they tend to view it as paycheck instead of passion
(and maybe not insignificantly, the lions share appear to come from Asian
countries with those country's concepts of work ethics and good jobs fueling
most of those women). I think there are far more males who, for whatever
reason, feel passionate about learning to build software.

Related, I've found anecdotally that _most_ "geek girls" I've met are not as
much into the substance of geekdom as they are into the image of geekdom. I've
met lots of women with Pac Man t-shirts and binary watches at Anime festivals
who couldn't give a rats ass about clock cycle counts for MOV operations on
different revisions of the 80486 chips, but I've met lots of guys in the same
clothing who owned aged dog-eared copies of Intel's multi-thousand page CPU
Guidebooks (and read them for escapism).

For guys, seeing another guy dressed out of the ThinkGeek catalogue is a
powerful signal of relevant knowledge, an ice-breaker of sorts as to how to
relate. While there certainly are real geek women, their cultural appearance
doesn't necessarily provide the same signaling. So when a geek chick shows up,
the conversation switches basically to something less geeked out (at least in
my experience) out of politeness.

I suppose this has two sides to it, the geek chick isn't then immersed into
the kinds of topical discussions about xyz algorithm so she doesn't learn
about it which cascades into never really getting as good as the boys, but to
the boys, they learned about this on their own, in isolation, because they
enjoyed it, and can't understand why anybody has to really be "coached" into
becoming a geek.

 _full disclosure, I met my wife in a programming course, and she most
definitely looks at it as paycheck_

------
amichail
I think a major problem is that much of computer science is not interesting.
And indeed, almost all jobs that you get after graduation are not interesting
either.

It's too much like a "pen science" -- focusing too much on implementation and
not enough on application. Imagine a science where students learn to write as
quickly as possible with a pen and to fill the page with as much writing as
possible. Who would want to get a "pen degree"?

The fact that many men want to major in CS reflects poorly on men.

The CS curriculum needs to be redesigned to be more applications-oriented and
the major needs to be renamed to reflect that change.

~~~
pgbovine
i haven't RTFA yet, but i'd be interested in seeing whether the same gender
gap exists in other countries; from talking with friends who grew up in places
like Eastern Europe, it seems like it wasn't as 'nerdy' for women to like
engineering, math, or computers, so more talented women got into the field in
college and as a career

~~~
bct
Malaysia has much higher proportions of women in Computer Science (~50%). It's
almost as if it's purely a cultural and social issue...

------
derwiki
Where do these uber nerdy programmers with poor hygiene habits work? I've
worked at a large corporation and a small start up in Silicon Valley, and I'm
hard pressed to think of any. Is this a minority that's somehow become the
stereotype for everybody?

------
obvioustroll
In other words, once again we are told that men are responsible for women's
problems.

~~~
jimbokun
I disagree. I was all prepared to wince at this article when I read the title.
However, the researchers go out of their way to say that some middle ground
should be found that welcomes women without rejecting current geek culture.
They made a point of quoting geek women who embraced computer science in least
in part because of its geekiness.

Ah, having typed this far, now I notice the obvioustroll username. Trolled,
indeed. :)

