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sarah
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June 30th, 2007
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November 10th, 2006
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January 30th, 2008
On women in the sciences: women now receive more than half of the undergraduate degrees in biology. I’ve heard that attributed to successful initiatives to recruit and encourage women to enter those programs. I’ve also heard it cynically attributed to the decline in salaries for general practitioners with the rise of HMOs.
On women in computer science: It is good to see a rise in women getting undergraduate degrees. When I graduated in 1990, it was at 18%—a sharp decline from the mid-eighties. Many women I know who graduated in the eighties said that their parents encouraged them to study CS, since they felt it was the career of the future. I also noticed that by the end of the 80s, there was no longer a widespread misconception that people would need to learn to program computers in order to use them effectively. I don’t know why that stat is rising again, but maybe we’re improving the image of what it means to study CS and become a software engineer (more on that: http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/archives/000212.html )
I’m a women who has been writing software and managing software projects since 1990. The gender gap may be closing in CS degrees, but it takes longer for it to close in the industry, especially in certain types of jobs. I’ve seen QA departments that had a good gender balance, often marketing, and occasionally management. Only once have I heard about a software development team with a majority of women—I think that was true of the AppleTalk group in the early 90s. Only 2 percent of open source developers are women . I’ve often been the only woman on my team and I am frequently in technical meetings with other companies where I am the only woman in the room, even though statistically 20–25% of the technical jobs in software are held by women.
There is huge bias against women by many people, and there are also people who actively seek to encourage women in the field. I can’t tell you how many times I have been seen as an existence proof by my peers. I have also had some wonderful mentors who were men. Early in my career I found the gender issues to be discouraging, then I got over it, now I’m either too senior to be affected or I’ve gotten really good at avoiding the large pockets of sexism in the industry or the industry has gotten better—probably a bit of all of these has happened.
Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls reports a lot of very good research about classroom education (before college). Also, while we have no curriculum standards for teaching computer science in elementary, middle and high schools, it continues to be hard to introduce girls to the subject. Many women I know never even considered CS, simply because they knew nothing about it.
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July 1st, 2007
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November 10th, 2006
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