Women in CS

A recent article on the NYT reminded me of a glaring issue in academia – gender imbalances in different departments. I do not consider this a social injustice like my liberal arts classmates do; rather, I think it’s a natural reflection of societal pressures and preferences. Like it or not, men are drawn to high-paying, high-pressure situations with minimal social contact. Engineering actually piqued the interests of some rather nerdy math whizzes I knew from high school, offering them a challenge to keep them away from drugs hacking DoD computers. Women, on the other hand, tend to be drawn to more cooperative disciplines that involve dealing with people. So, rather than constantly wonder how to “solve” the problem of a shortage of women in technical fields, let’s attribute it to a societal phenomenon that’s best left alone. After all, why aren’t we trying to solve the shortage of women in American Football or men in English class? Heck, women outnumber men in terms of undergraduate degrees bestowed and we’re not raising a ruckus about that. The cynic in me says that the men probably like it that way.

Some would argue that we are losing perspectives or a diverse set of views. Nonsense. There’s still a baseline 20% women in computers. They could provide the insight. If not, the men in the field who want female input can consult female colleagues, friends, or neighbours.

With that said, we should carefully examine and understand the structural causes of this difference. After all, we know that this difference in preference is not bestowed at birth; countries in Eastern Europe boast much higher proportions of women in technology. In other words, is there something about American culture that causes women to prefer interacting with people, which results in fewer choosing to go into CS.

I had a discussion of this last year with a female classmate in the CS deparment at Berkeley. She said, “we (women) like computers, but not the isolation,” which reinforces my theory that it is the perceived nature of computing that prevents it from becoming attractive to women. That is to say, women are exposed at an early age to images of the technogeek who speaks in l33t and other jargon but sadly lacks social skills; this creates a stereotype of the field as not being conducive for interpersonal interactions.

For other conversations on the matter, I present an old article by Phil Greenspun of MIT way back in 1995 as well as this post with excerpts from papers, well-argued points, and a nice summary of the issue.