On Aug 18, 2015, at 12:11 PM, Christopher Leslie <chris.leslie@nyu.edu> wrote:

Cultural determinism is as much a fallacy as technological determinism, and we could fault her question that way as well: just because Unix was developed in an era when racism was keenly felt, does Unix have to somehow bear the mark of that culture?

+1. I feel like I see this move being made more frequently…but it’s a better way to open a vein of exploration than to make a claim.

One interesting analogue (the real reason for this email) is Roy Wagner’s 2009 paper on the stable marriage problem as a gendered concept in mathematics/economics/computer science education, which I encountered after some undergraduates came to me to complain/critique its usage in the undergraduate CS curriculum here at MIT.

Asking these kinds of questions is important because we are still dealing with a community that is finding it difficult to diversify. The medical profession, which also was largely white and male in the 1960s, made it a professional imperative to diversify with the result that medical school admissions are much different than they were 50 years ago. Engineering and computer science have not been successful in that regard, despite noble attempts in various corners. SIGCIS and other groups could make an effort to explore the reasons for this failure.

The International Olympiad of Informatics, which is the top high school programming competition in the world, issued a paper this year looking over the last few (dismal) decades of (lack) of women in that particular program, what they’ve tried in the past, and what they might try in the future.