I spend a considerable amount of the day writing an entry to an online debate about the declining number of female computer science students. You won't believe the sad numbers from Denmark this fall: undergrad universities are getting between 3.6 and 7 % female first year students (these are only numbers from the two biggest universities, there are about two to three other small universities with other numbers). My own university (which only offers graduate education) has a roaring 35 % women. But then again, it has majors that include the word 'design', which I think is cheating...
I wrote a comment to an article that said 'we need females in tech industry because otherwise the industry will become all nerds'. This is apparently the solution: call all men nerds and use this as an argument to get more women. Bummer. I commented that women can be nerds as well and that the argument for having more women in tech industry and research is more complex than just having fewer nerds. Arguments that include a better distribution providing a comfortable work environment and having a more diverse set of people creating technical solutions for the diverse set of users. Not to mention the fact that women are cheating themselves away from good a pay check when they turn away from technical jobs in order to have 'good deed jobs' like nursing, child care and law (arguably the last example job is neither necessarily ‘good deed’ nor less paid than tech jobs). Wake up sisters, you can do plenty of good deeds by programming a system for the hospital, for the lawyers and for the poor people in Africa.
I received one reply where a guy argued that since computer science involves algorithms where there is most often one 'best' solution, it didn't matter if it was found by a man or a woman. He therefore didn’t see it as a major problem that there are so few females in the area. Besides the complete ridicules assumption that computer science = algorithms, I believe that people are different also due to their sex and this differences are part of making a good work environment. In the end the product you produce will be better when you have had many different eyes on it than if only one type of people developed it.
But it is a difficult discussion often ending up in a ‘guys against girls’ fight. I think it is in fact deeply personal to me in that I, as a woman, would love to see more women in my field. Not so they can take the guys’ attention away from me (don't they dare!) but so they can also experience what a wonderful world computer science in fact is. And I am not being ironic here, I do think that computer science is one of the funniest subjects (well most parts of computer science) and I dig the tech talk that I have everyday with my fellow (male...) researchers. Yes it's been tough, especially during my undergrad studies but if I should choose again I would choose the same. So I think more girls should consider computer science, just because it is fun. Isn’t that argument enough?
Posted by Louise at August 18, 2004 06:48 PM