Flashes of Panic

For one thing, there was an interesting Boston Globe article yesterday, “In computer science, a growing gender gap.” I am obligated to mention it, because it extensively quotes my department chair and the co-chair of the graduate committee, but it also raises a number of good points (and quotes Dr. Klawe). Part of the discussion centered on how the problem arose. Contrary to what is suggested by a few comments on my post and on the IT Blogwatch post, the Globe says it’s not because women just aren’t interested; to the contrary, a decade or three ago, there was a rush of interest from both men and women.

As the popularity of computer science soared in the first half of the 1980s, many university departments became overburdened and more competitive, some professors argue. Introductory classes were taught in a way that emphasized technical minutiae over a broader sense of what was important and exciting about the field, a style catering to the diehard—and overwhelmingly male—techies rather than curious new recruits. The last thing educators, besieged by students, worried about was attracting more, so they didn’t see the need to combat the image that took root in popular culture of the male computer geek with poor hygiene and glazed eyes.

So why do we care? That’s a complicated question, and there are two answers, hinted at both by Zuska’s reaction and the Globe article. First Zuska:

The proposed solutions all revolve around doing something to or for girls/women in order to bring them into CS.  This focus, intentionally or not, locates the problem within women.  Women need their interest raised, women need their confidence increased, women need their sense of belonging improved.  It seems to me that we ought to be phrasing the issue this way:  CS needs to improve its appeal to women, CS needs to stop behaviors and practices that undermine women’s confidence, CS needs to work at developing a more inclusive environment.

And, from the Globe:

The US economy is expected to add 1.5 million computer- and information-related jobs by 2012, while this country will have only half that many qualified graduates, according to one analysis of federal data. Meanwhile, the subject is becoming increasingly intertwined with fields ranging from homeland security to linguistics to biology and medicine.

“People who are mapping the genome are really computer scientists involved in biology,” said Lenore Blum, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Once again, why do we care? Because first, changing the culture of Computer Science does more than just close a gender gap; if that was all it did, it wouldn’t be worth doing. (Is anyone concerned about the gender gap in nursing schools?) First, if you’re only appealing to males, you’re narrowing your audience—in essence, you’re turning away half the intelligent people who might be interested in your program. CS, as I was told at one of the universities which eventually turned me down, can’t afford to be turning down potential bright students wherever they come from—male, female, young, old, whatever. There’s no room for that. (After all, Dorothea is recruiting the washouts turned-away for library science.)

There’s no room for that because it’s not just about computers. It’s about what computers can do for everything else. It’s about sequencing the genome; it’s about streamlining business processes. It’s about changing the way we share information. I got (back) in to CS because I saw how it affected the way we covered track meets, and because I could imagine how much potential change still exists. My sport still hasn’t even started to catch up with what’s possible with the internet; I’m using much more powerful tools now than Runner’s World was, or is even now.

I didn’t do CS as an undergraduate (as I’ve noted elsewhere, I was a Russian major,) and didn’t get back to it for years, because I got weeded out. I don’t blame my school or my professors; I didn’t have the desire, and I didn’t want to bother catching up with “all the boys who already knew everything.” I know what’s driving me now, even if I don’t know where it’s taking me, but I’m still very much an odd duck in this field. I’m lucky to be in the department I’m in; my most frequent study partner was a psychology major, and I know another new student who double-majored in Classics. I want a field that’s more friendly to women because that also means a field that’s more friendly to me. I don’t want to be so chained to a desk that I can’t run or swim or hunt an occasional geocache.

Too many people are making the mistake of thinking “CS” is the same as “IT” or “programming,” and that a CS job is a ticket to a job that has just been outsourced to India. There’s some truth behind that idea, but not enough. CS is also writing a better phylogenetic analysis tool. It’s spectrophotometric analysis of proteins at the medical school. It’s a bridge between the ChampionChip mats at the Boston Marathon and the race website. It’s computational linguistics, physics, and geology. It’s seeing the potential in this incredibly flexible machine we’ve created, and learning how to bring it out. People have these ideas. Some of those people are women; if they don’t study CS, and learn how to realize these ideas, society has to wait for someone else.

Now, is that enough to establish why having more women in Computer Science is a good idea?