Are you freaking KIDDING ME??? This is the most rampant sexist BS I have read in a LONG time. I sincerely hope you are NOT teaching your children this attitude. Are you really suggesting that, unlike for men, it’s not enough for women to be smart and competent and experienced – that they also have to wear “good perfume” and take yoga classes? So basically, it’s a woman’s job to make herself attractive to men in order to succeed in her career? And I find your comment about “sleeping to the top” to be incredibly offensive.
Back to the topic under discussion – I have a daughter who is very strong in math, and at one point I thought she might go into CS. I signed her up for some summer programming camps, where she felt “meh” about the subject matter, made a few good friends among the other girls, and pretty much universally disliked the boys. A lot of the boys were pretty socially clueless (hey, maybe they should take classes in how to talk to girls!) and a lot of them suffered from the problem mentioned in the article, where they were so eager to talk about what they knew that they came across as show-offs to the other students. I have a lot of sympathy with kids like that, so I don’t happen to think that they’re the problem here (in fact I think it’s good that they have a field to go into where their lack of social aptitude isn’t a career-killer; my older brother has Asperger’s and it has seriously limited his career advancement). But it does mean that teenage girls aren’t likely to want to major in something where they don’t really like most of the other students in their classes.
And of course this carries over to the workplace, which is why women who do graduate with degrees in CS often end up moving into other fields. I know a couple of women who started out as programmers and are now working in the communications-related part of the field – writing user guides and documentation, writing research papers, grant proposals, etc.
“…is a tiny technical school , smaller than a high school making a dent? NO. …What Harvey Mudd says or does is a blip on the graph and changes nothing.”
Harvey Mudd College was visited by ABET in 1997 as part of a pilot program to help in the implementation of their new criteria for engineering education (EC2000). HMC had been essentially meeting those criteria since the early 1960s. So Harvey Mudd served as a model for implementing the EC2000 criteria that all engineering schools and departments now strive for to get ABET accreditation.
Harvey Mudd started the Engineering Clinic in the 1960s. That is the model for many school’s senior capstone project.
Many schools are now adopting the practices that Harvey Mudd implemented to attract more women to CS. Harvey Mudd is an outsized blip on the graph and changes things for a lot of schools.
Such an interesting series of responses from @Coloradomama
I always thought it odd that until about 1985, CS was very gender balanced. Then the % of female participation seemed to fall off a cliff. I always thought that was interesting.
“I think the thing about the male students is that they tended to dominate the classroom discussions, often with arcane questions that were often more to show off their “chops” than actually advance the topic the class was covering.”
Sigh. I haven’t posted in a while since my Mudder graduated a few years ago, but this thread drives me crazy!! The Mudd CS majors graduate and get jobs in the top of the field (whether male or female) and get the top pay. I still can’t believe what my son is making at a major tech firm, doing work he loves. His female classmates have similar terrific positions. There is an assumption for those not familiar with Mudd that the curriculum must be easier than other places because the percentage of women is so high. That is what really drives me nuts. No Mudder is a coddled little flower. The hard grading makes all the students tough, resilient, and collaborative. They have to be or they will fail. And working with talented women in school is great for the men, who graduate and then get extra points in the work place because they have learned how to be collaborative and inclusive. Yes, I am a big fan of the Mudd approach because it was better for my son, not just better for his female peers. I am grateful that my son got his CS degree from a school that was not made up of stereotypical nerds. Mudd is full of non-stereotypical nerds! Folks in tech (and most of the workplace for that matter) work in teams. Study after study shows that teams which are diverse and collaborative are more successful. If you have a team of nothing but brogrammers, that team is not as successful. And, I don’t know of one of my son’s classmates who wanted to go into a top CS PhD program who didn’t get into one, and that included all the big universities. They have a tremendous advantage because of the research opportunities they have and the network their professors have with the graduate school professors. Mudders don’t have to compete with graduate students to get the great experience. The complaint I heard from professors was that many CS majors did not want to go into the PhD programs because they could make so much money going right into the workplace. If you don’t want to teach or do theoretical research, it is hard to justify on a cost benefit analysis the lost wages. Start-ups just sound so much sexier. That was the decision my Mudder made even though he really enjoyed his summer research project – which included presenting his research at a conference in Europe paid for by Mudd. The CS taught at Mudd is not CS light. It is CS tough, but introduced in a way that is more practical and novice friendly. My son was not in the novice class, but the novices catch up fast and are expected to meet the same requirements for graduation as those who came in with programming experience. Nothing prepares a young woman for success in the marketplace like having better skills than the jerks who want to hold her back (sure beats perfume and a sweet speaking voice). And the number of job offers, and subsequent job advancement that each of the Mudders that I know shows that employers agree.
I wonder whether Coloradomama has substantial data on how many HMC female CS graduates were rejected by PhD programs at the mentioned universities. Also, how many percents of female CS graduates from other places (USC, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, etc.) were similarly rejected. And getting a few rejection doesn’t mean that the graduate didn’t finally end up being accepted to one of those places. There have been more women in CS at HMC, but the total number is still very small. So not having seen them dominating the industry is trivial, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t get a good job. It’s easy to generalize things from a personal perception. But I doubt that an outsider really has substantial information about what majority of HMC female CS graduates are doing and has it objectively analysed.
My kid is physics with a CS concentration within the physics major. She has been accepted to six PhD programs so far out of the 11 grad school programs she applied to (no word yet from the other 5, and as far as is evident online, at least 4 of those have not sent out their first wave of acceptances yet). That poster has no clue. My kid does not have a great GPA, but has very good test scores, great research experience, and strong rec letters. Mudd is well known in academic circles and in tech hiring.
