Geeks drive girls out of Computer Science

[Doc]

Blankity Blank wrote:
Reading the article, the study sounds like it's less about behavior and more about environment.

As someone who works with computer graphics professionals, I find that women -- who easily make up at least 50% of the field -- decorate their spaces with geeky toys just as often as men... just with slightly different kinds of toys.

For example, where a guy might have posters, in-box action figures and logo-pins on the walls with action figures and toy guns in violent and suggestive poses scattered haphazardly around, women generally seem to go for stuff like animation-stills and oddball artwork on the walls and 1950s robots, plush dolls or wind-up toys arranged in neat rows around the work-space.

So, the specific type of geeky stuff may have been what turned off the women. Not just that the stuff was geeky.

[GGD]

just 22 percent of computer-science graduates are women, a percentage that has been steadily decreasing, according to 2008 data from the National Science Foundation...

If 22% today represents a steady decline, where were all of these females that should have been CS majors back in the 70s when I was in college? They were very rare.

[mattkime]

GGD wrote:

just 22 percent of computer-science graduates are women, a percentage that has been steadily decreasing, according to 2008 data from the National Science Foundation...

If 22% today represents a steady decline, where were all of these females that should have been CS majors back in the 70s when I was in college? They were very rare.

In the 1970s there was 1 CS major. now there is 0.78.

[guitarist]

I'm entertained by the defensive reaction, provoked by this minor study. Dismissing it as flawed, or invalid. My only complaint about the study is that its premise, and conclusions, are obvious, self-evident, it's not really news. It's a trivial (small-scale, imprecise) way to illustrate something we already know. I'd be curious to see some input from our rare women members, the few that can tolerate the male clubhouse environment here at macresource forums.

My wife works at Microsoft, in an overwhelmingly male environment, not unlike the one described here. For reasons only known to her, has always sought professional environments where women were traditionally unwelcome (like construction, math, computer science, etc.) and thrives there, in spite of the predictably anti-feminine atmosphere. She's one of the odd ones that adapted easily to it. (and MS is full of egotistical male geeks)

What struck me as funny is that here we have what might be the last bastion of masculinity is a professional field--one of the rare places that hasn't been gender neutralized with pretty potted plants and other cozy artifacts of a bland, generic workplace, but instead has the potential for untainted classical male self-expression--one of our last refuges! Where men can be men!

And how do they define "masculine environment"? Star Trek icons and junk food wrappers? This is masculine??? It doesn't strike me as masculine at all. It's more like arrested adolescence. Pimply-faced, inadequately-socialized geeky teenage boy environment. Of course that would turn women off. You'd think it would have the same affect on normal males, too.

[RAMd®d]

You'd think it would have the same affect on normal males, too.

The qualifier is "normal" males, presumed to have matured. Besides being able to identify, I imagine most males would assume they could alphadog a situation and change the environment enough to suit them.

I remember somebody posting about that Heart-Attack (?) burger place. The owner dresses like a doctor' the rest of the "nurses" outfits show them off as well as tops do.

Note the poster of Lucky Strikes on the wall.

There may be a YouTube video about that place.

[guitarist]

Hey it could be worse. The study could have said "Greeks drive girls out of Computer Science"