@mathmom, My kids are engineers but have gravitated to jobs that involve a lot of work with computers. My nephew is a CS grad. All were very athletic (nephew was a varsity athlete in college), lots of interests, with good social skills. They also do some gaming , but that is only one part of who they are. They have engineer and CS friends that like to hike, camp, travel,etc. A CS guy one kid works with used to be an Army Ranger. Another is in a rock band. Just like people in many professions, there are all kinds of people in engineering and CS. One thing they do have in common is an interest and aptitude that fits with engineering or CS. My examples are , of course, anecdotal.
None of the people who I ever worked in my 9 jobs as a computer programmer remotely resemble anybody in Big Bang Theory. This show is one of my H’s and D’s favorite. I cannot grasp an idea of very smart people being stupid, does not mush together in my brain. Apparently, I am wrong by many others who love the show, including my own family.
I don’t think 30 years in IT is anything like CS hires today. These kids are smart, into their health and fitness, what they eat and helping the world, while making great money. Gender is irrelevant, talent is. That is what we see at today’s high tech firms (not talking the IBM’s and AT&T types of long ago).
I can’t watch 5 minutes of Big Bang Theory cause it is so unreal, and frankly offensive, with the way they stereotype, and just plain annoying. Listening to them talk is fingernails on a chalkboard to me. What an easy pay day for the actors playing a one dimensional role that never changes. It’s like Disney shows that play the adult characters limp minded and stupid in a world of teens all sharp and sassy. The intellectual level is just too low. Can’t watch them, sorry for digression…
@MiamiDAP just to clarify, I’m a woman majoring in CS. I don’t actually believe that statement (cheerios ect), it’s just something my mom used to say when she was trying to convince me to major in something else
@scotlandcalling , the IBM of yesteryear is not what is happening today. My DD is interning at IBM and it is a great place to work. Half of the 16 interns are females and 3 out of 4 of her project team is female. Her immediate mentor is female. The head of the research dept. - female. They do balance work/life. Their workspace is open with all the toys. They do have career paths and want to develop employees for long term. They also look out of the box for employees. The business interns are from Wharton, Stern and Harvard. The CS/CE are from all over. It would be a great place for my DD to start a career.
Certainly there are huge differences between IT 30 years ago and today - I’m well aware of that as I am responsible for a lot of my company’s hiring today and it looks nothing like my resume back then. Although I do think we were smart 30 years ago as well - what we learned in school was very different, like writing in assembly language and coding our own primitive compilers, but to still be relevant in the industry today means we’ve kept up with rapidly evolving technology. And this generation did not invent wanting to help the world…
While gender is irrelevant with regard to talent, it just seems unfortunate if females are self-selecting out of the field. It’s hard to understand how else there could be such an imbalance. It might be that companies such as IBM have found their way to a better gender balance, but that’s certainly not reflected in the company I work for or the enterprise-level companies we work with. If you look at the numbers of graduates in CS, there is still a significant gap in gender.
I mean no disrespect, but CS in the 70s and 80s was 30-40 years ago and things have changed. My CS major’s best friends are also CS students or grads, one of the gals has multi-million dollar funding for a company at age 23, the other females are at incredible jobs with big starting salaries where gender is irrelevant, perhaps because they are all equally talented or are with modern high tech employers where respect is no problem… **Each one of them is amazing and frankly, tough to the core, they don’t lack confidence that’s for sure. ** /quote @blueskies2day - I’m not 100% sure what point you’re trying to make. Saying that women graduates in CS are amazing and tough to the core is, if anything, support for the argument that women need to be amazing and tough to the core to make it through. (I think the argument / discussion on this thread is "do girls / women get pressured out of CS somewhere along the line, much more so than boys? Alternatively, maybe there isn’t any argument?? ) I don’t think anyone doubts that there are confident amazing boys and girls that end up in CS. The question is more about - is the bar (much) higher for women? (And I mainly mean a self-selecting bar - where women are possibly much more likely to switch to different fields.)
WRT to “girls make games” and things like that. My DD - who of course is definitely one of a kind - hated these girls-only programs. “I don’t want to be thought of as a girl who programs, I want to be thought of as a programmer!” She does not want to be reminded of the fact that girls might face a more difficult journey. She is very opposed to engage with any of these women-in-engineering groups.
Not sure if it means anything, other than it being an anecdote.
It is so interesting that law and medicine used to be male dominated fields. No longer is that true. The brogrammer mentalility and the fact that women are not encouraged to major in CS has made it difficult for women to major in CS. I believe that both MIT and Harvard do a good job of encouraging women and their CS major rate is approaching 40 per cent. The colleges need to hire female professors and TAs and have active Women in CS groups and have a departmental structure that encourages women if the number of women is to increase.
"She is very opposed to engage with any of these women in engineering groups? " Why is any of that dismissed out of hand? There seems to be support, mentoring in many programs.
CS is a tiny fraction of the population. The vast majority of boys (99%?) aren't interested in programming. Girls, in general, seem intrinsically less interested in tech nitty-gritty details (e.g. taking things apart) and that makes matters worse. Still, that graph showing the decline is pretty surprising.
Giving special "encouragement" for girls in tech can backfire. My daughter was on a robotics team in 5th grade. They made it to the state level partly because they extra points for having a girl on the team. When she found out, she was embarrassed by it. Did the organizers not think that a smart kid wouldn't be able to discover this information?
In my experience raising a daughter these days (she’ll be a junior in HS), being labeled a “smart” kid is negative. It has always been that way but I think that social media has magnified exponentially all of the middle school and high school insecurities. The “popular” crowd always makes fun of the “smart” crowd and absolutely everyone dreads being labeled a “nerd”. DD’s grandmother (my mother-in-law) is a programmer and I’m a programmer. It’s in my D’s genes yet I can’t get her interested! She would have a blast with the craziness and opportunities in the tech world. One positive note, she did decide to take AP Computer Science Principles this year … but only after I printed out the sample AP quiz, gave it to her, and she answered almost all the questions correctly. It demystified computer science for her.
Note: I don’t want her to be a computer programmer but rather to know how to write programs for her main interests.
Being labeled a “smart kid” is not always negative. Never a bad thing for my kids in their diverse public school. They were popular, athletic , You just can’t generalize. The “girls” in general were more interested in getting the A’s and being competitive. Worried about busy work. Another stereotype. But that was their particular city public school.
Well, if the women’s groups have “lost the plot,” maybe the wife can help them . But what does that mean in terms of women and engineering and CS?
Oh, come on. The “popular” versus “smart” issue has been going on in HS since time began. I was talking to my sister the other day and she commented on how she was categorized into the “smart” group in HS as well (this was back in the 1970s). I was drifting in HS myself until my math teacher pulled me out of Study Hall into her computer class. It was a dry, mathematical field … until I made what amounted to a screensaver on an Apple II that people crowded around to see. CS became “cool” and I was off and running.
When I look at the AP Computer Science documents (not the new Principles class) I see the same old dry programming stuff. No kids in HS care about sorting algorithms, order, etc. At that level it needs to be fun. For example, take an image of the teacher and swap the red and blue components in code, warp the image, etc. Kids love that kind of stuff. Keep up with the times by creating a server that allows messaging between students. My daughter’s really into alternative music and getting tickets to concerts … so create an online forum for students to exchange tickets and meet up for rides to concerts. There are a many opportunities to make CS interesting to kids these days. Otherwise, the field will remain a “nerd” topic and be dismissed early on (especially by girls).
I went to college in the 80’s but I always thought the Engineering students were more nerdy than the CS students. I don’t remember many girls in either.
A couple of people mentioned not seeing many nerds in IT departments. That hasn’t been my experience at all. I think there’s a pretty good mix of nerds and more mainstream people, depending on what industry you’re in, but the real nerds, who you wouldn’t dare put in front of a customer, are definitely out there. They’re just hidden away, in the dark rooms, with the Cheerios
I’m very surprised there aren’t more women in CS. I can see women being less interested in the Engineering majors, just because they seem generally less interested in taking things apart, as someone mentioned. I’m not saying it should be that way at all. It’s just my impression that that IS the way it is. CS seems closer to pure Math to me. It’s problem solving with your mind, not your hands. I’m surprised it doesn’t appeal to more women.
As far as nerds being mean to girls - that both surprises me, and doesn’t surprise me at all. I can imagine there are some very insecure, inexperienced young guys who have no idea how to act around women, so they just make stupid jokes without thinking. But I would think that the majority of nerdy guys would be more mature when it comes to being mean. Many of them have been the victim themselves, and being smarter, I’d think that most of them would be a bit too intelligent for the types of behavior that people mentioned. Jocks on the other hand…
^^Agree 100% with @marvin100 . I’ve been following this discussion because I have two daughters involved in robotics, and one who is already proficient in CS and is going to major in it in college.
I’ve coached younger D’s all-girl robotics team to a national championship trophy (with older D acting as the assistant programming coach), and I’ve seen all sorts of bad behavior that I wouldn’t necessarily tag to the gender, but the culture. It just happens that the culture is predominantly male.
Older D (17) is tough and determined, and takes no crap from people behaving badly on the many teams she’s worked on (because a lot of CS is team-oriented in some way). Younger D (15) is very sensitive and really struggled with the “brogrammer” attitudes at the high school. Last year a kid on her team punched her in the face for disagreeing with him. It was bad, really really bad. If he’d drawn blood or damaged her physically in any way, we would have immediately called the police.
As it was, the kid was removed from the team for six months (I was beyond angry with that-I wanted him out for good) and he had to undergo counseling and anger management classes (I was ok with that). Younger D quit the robotics group soon after that, which really broke my heart. She said “I’m tired of the attitudes all day long, it makes robotics no fun.” She’s still doing animatronics, at least. She’s a brilliant builder.
Older D takes things apart (once returned from a friend’s house in elementary school with burns on her fingers because she took apart a computer and burned her fingers on the batteries on one of the boards), and younger D is super good at looking at a pile of junk and MacGyvering it into something amazing (gets that from Mom ).
You can’t pigeonhole girls, but you can point fingers at a culture that is super-unhealthy for them and say “things need to be done differently here” if you want more women to stay with it. A few times older D has worried about choosing CS as a career, and H (who is a senior director of software development and has an MS in CS) has assured her that most companies have a really amazing support system for women who are CS. A lot of girls don’t have that direct reassurance from someone in the industry, and I think they need it.
I’m in architecture which was once a male dominated field, but by the time I was in grad school the numbers were close to 50/50 in our class. There were more techy architecture schools where that was not the case though. Even now though only 20% of women are licensed and an AIA survey showed only 17% were principals in firms. I’ve met very little sexism myself.
Maybe some parents have figured out that a CS major from an average - competent school (not the top schools) has about as bright a future as buggy making. My wife and I are both CS majors (among other things) with a combined 59 years CS work experience between the two of us. We were relieved that neither of our kids showed any inclination towards programming or CS.
I, and especially my wife, have been in the forefront of outsourcing since 2000 at least. She has changed jobs enough times (generally right ahead of a cut, a couple times after) to know that it’s a numbers game, and at some point your number comes up. Her last position was about as secure as one in the Supreme Court, but the company decided to cut older workers (nah, no ageism) and she had to look again. Don’t get me wrong, she found about the most low-key 9-5 job one could think of with a major company, boring, but royally compensated and work from home (the office is 20 min away). And had an absurd number of offers to begin with for someone her age (57). And has a superb, diverse, and desirable skill set (analytics, data warehousing/data mining, database, SAP…)
But the bottom line is, some of us in the trenches have seen what CS looks like, and let’s just say don’t like what we see. Yea, if you get a CS degree from a great school, you’re ahead of the crowd a bit, but at some point your number will come up. And that’s not even counting the part where after a certain age you’re either expendable or become a PowerPoint engineer.
My older daughter is a grad student in Architecture and the younger is starting Biology/Pre-Med this fall… Both girls are top students and I don’t think being a female arch student and dealing with the male arch culture is much different than dealing with the male CS culture… There’s more women in Arch than in CS but still… Bio is more popular with women but at some point there’s enough Chem, Phys, Math etc in the curriculum to make one wonder
No, it’s an observation based on watching my daughter and all her friends grow up. Same neighborhood, same ages, same schools, mostly the same classes in school, and same socioeconomic environment. They all use computers all day long (PCs and smartphones). I’m the only parent that has built a PC in front of their kid … yet at one or two of the boys’ houses their PCs are taken apart and rebuilt constantly (I know, the parents call me to help fix the resulting issues). There is no “problem” with beliefs here.
Would there be a problem with other observations, like girls seem intrinsically better at school than boys? Have “their ducks in a row” far more than boys? I’ve seen it in other families and the parents of mixed families (we only have a daughter) see it as well. For example, the mom of one of the boys mentioned earlier said the following last year, “[daughter] is doing great, maybe a little bored with school. [son] has a 15, yes a 15, average in one of his classes. OMG!”.
) I don’t think anyone doubts that there are confident amazing boys and girls that end up in CS. The question is more about - is the bar (much) higher for women? (And I mainly mean a self-selecting bar - where women are possibly much more likely to switch to different fields.)
).