Computer Science’s Image Problem
NYT: Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold
I find this article baffling and the comments on it aggravating.
“The nerd factor is huge,” Dr. Cuny said. … This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. ‘They think of it as programming,’ Dr. Cuny said. ‘They don’t think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth.’
Well, of course it’s programming. Trying to sell CS as somehow not being about programming is false advertising — it’s like telling kids that chemistry isn’t about molecules or mathematics isn’t about numbers. Sure, there are scientists using computers to design medicines or study the climate. But they’re not computer scientists, they’re biologists or geologists. Computer science is about software.
How is it that people can be so excited by the Internet and digital media, but totally turned off by the prospect of designing the stuff that makes those things work? They seem to confuse computer science with data-entry, or boring MIS drudgery like writing payroll systems. Or do they just totally not care about where things like web search and MP3 codecs and 3D graphics and peer-to-peer protocols come from … are they just some magic that falls out of the sky and no one should give a second thought to?
Another issue here is the distinction between Computer Science as a field of academic study, versus actual software engineering / programming / hacking. This is a young field (just as chemistry and aeronautics used to be) and not very codified yet. That’s part of the fun — it’s all being made up as we go along, and there aren’t so many tomes of knowledge that have to be digested first. I had a great time in college … but I have to admit that it didn’t directly teach me that much about programming. I learned a great deal of useful science and mathematics, I had access to a lot of computers and time to do a lot of hacking, and I hung around with brilliant people whom I got some good ideas from. But I’ve worked with people who are great software engineers despite not having a college degree … or having a degree in a different field like physics or psychology. So the number of people (and their M/F ratio) getting degrees in CS may not be that relevant.
On the downside, I’ve looked at the source code to enough open source projects to realize that there are a lot of people out there writing code whose basic programming skills are very, very poor; they probably could have used a solid undergraduate CS introduction. (Not to start any flames, but PHP seems especially prone to this … I think it’s kind of the BASIC of the modern era. The barrier to entry is so low, and the language so ad hoc, that people can just flail around in it.)
And I’m not even addressing the main point, the low and diminishing proportion of women in the field. In fact, my experience is that the ratio is a lot worse than the figures like 25% that they quote in the article: I’ve almost never worked in an environment where more than about 10% of the technical people were female. Which is really sad, in many ways.
April 17th, 2007 at 12:49 AM
Almost certainly. In our culture of ignorance, caring about how things work is an obscure nerd thing.
What, me cynical?
By the way, your comment form is broken. Trying to use a LiveJournal OpenID doesn’t work – LJ says that it’s “an identity I can’t provide”. Using a name and e-mail doesn’t work, because it tries to use an OpenID even if the field is empty, even after reloading the page.
April 17th, 2007 at 1:42 AM
I know that isn’t your main point but huge parts of mathematics aren’t about numbers.
I’m with Ahruman on the ignorance. My impression is that stuff like MP3 is sold to people as ‘magic’ and people are encouraged to just accept that rather than to think about it or even wonder how these things work.
Hm, Baskerville :)
April 17th, 2007 at 6:39 AM
Oh man, I read the article, and I started to read the comments and only got part way through the third one before I decided this was going to give me a raging headache.
Having had no coffee yet, I’m unable to give a thoughtful, intelligent reply here, but… this has riled me up… and so I’m probably just going to rant incoherently about it for a little while. Please bear with me. Or, my apologies, in advance! ;-)
First off, what’s wrong with nerdy? Nerdy is great! I am proud to be nerdy, to be logical, to enjoy problem-solving, to be interested in how things work, and to make my living in software engineering. As you know, Jens, I only wish I knew more about things like compilers and low-level OS design!
Saying that the reason women don’t get into computer science careers is because intro CS courses “emphasize programming” is flat-out ridiculous. To move entirely away from engineering and math fields, and into something, dare I say, girly, like English… you could similarly try to argue that introductory English courses ought not emphasize the development of writing skills. What freshman wants to be stuck writing boring essays, practicing grammar, vocabulary, and structure, when they could just spend their time reading great books, right? Well, there are still a lot of female English majors, even though they spent countless late nights writing essays.
While I agree that the ratio of men to women is still sadly off-kilter in our field (how could one not agree when it’s so obvious), I don’t think the Times, or its commenters, has done anything to elucidate the real reasons for it. Rather than be confronted with more irritating hypotheses about why women don’t roam the halls of software and computer companies in greater numbers, I’d like to see somebody address the meta-problem here: Why hasn’t anybody been successful in investigating (and determining) the sources of the problem? I think, before we can answer “why don’t more women take up careers in computing and software engineering,” we must answer “why haven’t the existing approaches for answering the preceding question worked?”
Just anecdotally… one of the tactics I’ve seen employed, in an effort to address issue, is for a company to interview its female engineers about what they think the sources of the inequity might be. The obvious flaw here: they’re talking to the women who took the jobs! We don’t know much more about why women don’t flock to do what we do, any more than the guys in the offices all around us. I think it’s neat, and can’t fathom why other women wouldn’t think the same thing.
OK, I’m off of my headachy/no-caffeine high horse, and will stop littering your blog with my ranting. :-)
April 17th, 2007 at 7:33 AM
[…] Jens Alfke: […]
April 17th, 2007 at 8:14 AM
Hi Mr. Alfke,
I was just reading the comments from the nytimes article. I am CS major, and found some of the comments to be a bit discouraging — until I came upon yours. You perfectly describe the reasons that I was unable to articulate about pursing this field of study. Coincidentally, I highlighted your comment to paste it into Stickies to save for future reference. Then, for some reason I decided to “google” your name — viola! what a beautiful moment of discovery!
Thank you again for taking the time to share your VALUABLE perspective. It hit the spot.
David Frederick
April 17th, 2007 at 8:40 AM
Oh, but it’s more than programming…
Jens Alke
Or do they just totally not care about where things like web search and MP3 codecs and 3D graphics and peer-to-peer protocols come from … are they just some magic that falls out of the sky and no one should give a second thought to?…
April 17th, 2007 at 8:58 AM
In that photo, the girl to the right of Ed is my friend Sierra!
That is all.
(Oh, and that the OpenID stuff is broken.)
April 17th, 2007 at 5:15 PM
I think one of the issues surrounding the CS gender gap is an emotional one. Generally speaking, CS people and hackers (in the Eric Raymond sense of the word), need to have thick skins to thrive in an environment where intense peer review is so prevalent and necessary, and discussions can be straightforward to the point of seeming rude. And while a certain amount of this is typical of the “business world”, the criticisms the CS/hacker-types have to deal with tend to be much more personal, weather they’re meant that way or not. I’m not saying that women can’t handle it. It’s just that most women I’ve known for a while would be classified as “Feeling” by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personal test. Just a thought, though … I’m really not sure if this would hold up past my personal experiences.
April 17th, 2007 at 5:23 PM
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:09 PM
As the previous commenter notes, Dijkstra would take serious issue with your proposition that CS is programming.
I suppose programming could be a vague term, but I think most people tend to associate it with creating source code in one of a few major languages with the goal of creating some sort of working system.
What you say of Alan Turing and his contemporaries who, at least early in their careers, were working before the electronic computer was even a reality?
The new, novel, and interesting parts of things like MP3 codecs are completely based the physics of sound and the psychology of human hearing and the theory of information compression. Programming is an afterthought to the creation of the algorithm which relies almost exclusively on knowledge external to the operation of an electronic computer.
Granted CS is still a young science so most areas that would fall under engineering in any other field tend to be lumped in with Computer Science. It is these more engineering type of things that “are” programming, so CS umbrella does include areas that are programming, but it also includes a lot more.
I think in the article, Computer Science is used in the sense of the more traditional academic use of the word science - meaning pure rather than applied. It’s somewhat of a new use, but with Software Engineering finally emerging as a separate discipline, it is an increasingly valid use.
April 17th, 2007 at 10:59 PM
[…] this NYT article provokes Jens Alfke: How is it that people can be so excited by the Internet and digital media, but totally turned off by the prospect of designing the stuff that makes those things work? They seem to confuse computer science with data-entry, or boring MIS drudgery like writing payroll systems. Or do they just totally not care about where things like web search and MP3 codecs and 3D graphics and peer-to-peer protocols come from … are they just some magic that falls out of the sky and no one should give a second thought to? […]
April 18th, 2007 at 12:49 AM
hi jens. thanks for the comment, and the main reason i didn’t want to comment here was because the quality of my comment is not up to par with the comments here :)
in india(where i live), a lot of women are getting into the software field, not just because it pays better than most other options(which it does) but because it has become the cool thing to do. and it’s not just CS majors who are joining the software industry, it’s the MEs, the CEs, the EEs and pretty much all branches.
at ohio university where i went to school for a while, the campus was about (or a bit over) 2/3rds women. however, in the engineering department, the number was probably about half of that, if not worse. this probably shapes a lot of my observations, though i’m not entirely clear on the current stats. trying to find out more.
April 18th, 2007 at 2:10 AM
Food for thought:
1. The name “Computer Science” - other sciences are perfectly ok without them having to add the word Science in front: nobody is getting a degree in Chemistry Science, Biology Science or Physics Science. This is probably because Computer Science is made up of Applied Mathematics and other stuff, which make it thinks it’s inadequate.
2. Since CS is “a young field” and “not very codified yet”, we must also realize the Software Engineering is at best an incomplete form of engineering, as in engineering one applies science.
April 18th, 2007 at 7:04 AM
I think the NYTimes article is trying to say that a computer science major is about more than just programming, not that programming should be eliminated or even de-emphasized. Biology and chemistry departments have some of the highest percentages of women, not because women are doing pure research in biology (although many are) but because they want to become doctors. These same women (and the men who think computer science is ‘nerdy’) might go into computer science if they knew that they could go into computational biology and figure out how cancer cells start dividing rapidly. There are many things you can do with a computer science degree that is not writing an operating system or a more efficient codec. But some of these people who may go into computer science for other reasons may fall in love with it and want to do it for its own sake anyway.
Not true, universities often have a “Department of Biological Sciences” or “Department of Mathematical Sciences”
April 18th, 2007 at 1:41 PM
I have to disagree about the programming comment. Computer Science is the mathematics of computation.
Programming is a tool that computer scientists use to perform experiments.
If you are a programmer ( like me, writing applications in a large corporation ) you are not a computer scientist.
Why arent women involved in CS? I suggest that it is the nature of the machines that we use. Computers are dehumanizing. As a result they are a great tool for people who have trouble communicating with humans ( most programmers I know are socially under developed ). Could it be that the rate of socialization problems in men is higher than women? Possibly, the rate of autism in men is 4x higher than in women. It seems reasonable that other developmental problems are also unevenly distributed.
That being said, it is clear from the article that it is possible to change the engagement rate of women. A successful technique seems to one of reducing the visibility of the aspects of computer science that are attractive to prototypical geeks and nerds. An emphasis on the applications of CS. It doesnt all have to be designing languages and writing operating systems. Ultimately applications of CS are the realm of engineering.
At my school there were a lot more women in EE than in CS.
April 18th, 2007 at 3:49 PM
Jon Hart: Computer Science as you (and some others above) define it is only a very small fraction of the field. Yes, there are people who study abstract mathematics of computation. In my experience they tended to be in the math department, though; the CS profs at Caltech were much more concrete.
Moreover, I don’t think any significant fraction of the students who major in CS are going into that sort of field of study, so I don’t think it’s relevant to the article (except possibly as something that would scare students, except really hard-core math-heads, away from CS.)
“Computers are dehumanizing” — well, so are any kind of machines. Then why aren’t women turned off by other engineering fields, or hard sciences? In the case of EE, I found bare circuit boards a thousand times more inhuman and frustrating than a computer interface!
April 19th, 2007 at 1:23 PM
I believe that the inbalance of men and women in CS is very much of a cultural effect. At a past job, at least a third of the people in IT were women. However, all of them except one was Indian. So what is the difference between the women in the U.S. and India?
This might be due to a long standing effect from 1950’s Americana. Men became doctors and engineers, whereas women were nurses and school teachers. Sadly, that hasn’t radically changed over the years. It is getting mixed up somewhat, but the majority of nursing classes are women, and most people in engineering are men. Perhaps things will eventually even out, but it might take another couple of decades for everything to settle into place.
April 19th, 2007 at 10:04 PM
I went to a college prep high school for girls in the 70’s. A high proportion of us majored in the hard sciences in college. I enjoyed being a math major but left the field for three reasons:
1. The male culture of the math department was pretty unbearable. Maybe I would have been able to stand it better if I’d gone to a co-ed high school, but then, of course, I wouldn’t have gone into math in college.
It’s not sexual harrassment that I’m talking about, although that certainly was present. It was the relentless posturing, the comparison of brain size as though brains were penises and anyone cared, the professors who said that any good contributions would have to be made in the next few years before our brains burned out, the idea that if you couldn’t instantly grasp (or pretend to grasp) any concept, no amount of hard work could save you. This is total bullshit but I believed it at the time.
2. I was under the erroneous impression that the only job options for math majors were teaching or the military. Indeed, most of my classmates whose careers I followed ended up working for the military, one way or another. I didn’t want to teach and was a pacifist. It was only years later that it occurred to me that there might have been other job options out there, but that wasn’t the impression that my professors or recruiters gave.
3. I love an elegant proof. I love poking around in uncharted territory to see if you can come up with interesting structures and theorems. I love the edgy interface between the real world and the shapes and rules of the mathematical world. But I found a richer joy in burred edges, in textures and the surprising idea that you could be wrong but still functional. I’d spent my first two decades thinking; been there, done that. I wanted to dig ditches, to paint pictures, to play clarinet and milk goats. A lot of formerly mathematical women I’ve talked to left the field for that reason.
Maybe this has parallels with computer science?
April 21st, 2007 at 1:44 PM
Thomas - I’m not so sure I agree. Groups of women can be very critical of each other, and I can think of more than a few male developers I’ve worked with who take criticism personally.
It does highlight an interesting question though - are women actually driven out of the industry? I’m under the impression it’s quite a good industry to work in as a woman - so long as you’re not in the ‘long hours crunch zone’ it often offers very good flexible working hours, telecommuting, etc - and good opportunities for anyone who can bridge the ‘social skills’/’coding’ gap. I’ve certainly never seen an attitude expressed that someone may not be able to code or their opinion counts for less because of their gender, whereas female friends working in more traditional engineering jobs - the kind where you deal with mechanics - still find that attitude present. I will say that I’ve known some truly excellent female developers but only one who actually loved software development as a source of intellectual satisfaction in itself.
I thought the issue was more around entry to the field - and why it’s in decline. After all, as a discipline it is no more geeky than it was in 1972. On the other hand, I do think our culture has changed significantly since the early 70s, in a way that makes that geekiness a problem - we inherit our value system a lot less from parents and teachers, and more from the media and peers.
(And yes, I know ‘geeks’ are cool, but that generally means tousle-haired web designers with retro specs and a collection of vintage trainers, not guys with beards and penguin T-shirts).
I think one difference between India and the US is that a lot of people got into computers in the US and UK through the early 80s microcomputer revolution - almost all my friends at school who had a computer before they became games machines have gone into programming (regardless of class). Without exception they were all male. Whereas I suspect in India programming has been introduced more through education - and the same was true before the 80s.
Which could bring me onto a rant about the decline of programming in the school curriculum - perhaps if it was taught as part of maths and sciences as a problem solving tool, people would be a lot less scared of it. Instead, IT education has largely become ‘how to use MS Office’. Still it’s interesting to see the biggest search item on mySpace is HTML!
April 21st, 2007 at 3:26 PM
JulesLt - To be sure, I was referring to interaction between males and females. From what I’ve seen, you’re completely justified in asserting that women can be very critical of each other. However, I have also found that a different set of rules apply to a situation where a man criticizes a woman, which is more frowned upon (or at least that what experience tells me).
Also, upon reflection on my theories, my previous arguments would be more suited to explaining why women leave CS, not why they don’t start in the first place. The way I see it, the big recursive problem with women entering (or not entering, as the case may be) the field involves women not being in CS in the first place. Now that is a tough nut to crack.
Finally, Tim O’Reilly weighed in on this issue recently. see: O’Reilly Radar > Women in Computer Science.