[SIGCIS-Members] NPR - When Women Stopped Coding

[McMillan, William W]

Maybe it's too obvious to point out, but the international graduate student population studying computer science in the U.S. -- and many other countries, I suppose -- was certainly not hit by any mid-1980s falloff.

Our graduate student body was dominated (maybe 90%) by female students from China and India, and we were bursting at the seams.

My U. at the time, Eastern Michigan U., is 6 mi. from U. Michigan, and many of our M.S. students were spouses, mostly wives, of Ph.D. students at U-M, so our majority female population was partially a result of that.  But, still, this demonstrated a huge interest among women.  (One female student whose family had forced her to study art in China, ate up computer science and mathematics as if she were starving for it.)

(This changed in the U.S. after 9/11 and we finally realized the threat posed by 22-year-old wives of Asian Ph.D. students.)

A faculty colleague from the Philippines told me that half of the computer science student population was female in that country.  She thought it was because computer science was seen there as a feminine version of engineering.  (Take that, hacker boy!)

I'm sure that people on this list are aware of the differences between male/female ratios in technical disciplines across cultures and nations.  I don't see how movement to personal computers and social forces like advertising could explain very much of the disparity in the U.S. all of a sudden.

Nathan has something in the masculinization and grubbification of computing at universities and small software companies, but didn't that happen all around the world?

Bill

________________________________________
From: Members [members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Dag Spicer [dspicer at computerhistory.org]
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2015 4:08 PM
To: members at lists.sigcis.org
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] NPR - When Women Stopped Coding

Interesting piece… would be interesting in people’s thoughts…

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding

Dag


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