Female geeks wanted
January 24th, 2010
Young women are avoiding computer science because of geeks. These are described as men with “masculine geeky” traits like addiction to computer games, science fiction memorabilia, and junk food. The women also apparently resent the geeks’ propensity for memorizing Star Trek lines and “never leaving the lab”. So says a recent study from the University of Washington.
The study suggests that women are missing out on “the best career opportunities” while the field is missing out on “female perspectives”. In hard numbers, only 22% of computer science students are women who, when last we checked, make up more than 50% of the population. This is a concern.
Furthermore, it appears that the aesthetics (such as they are) of a stereotypical geekified computer science lab are enough to send young women running. Turn-offs in the repulsive environment included “Star Trek posters, video game boxes and Coke cans”. It’s worth noting that many men also avoided the geekish setting, it’s just that more women were turned off by it than men. Remarkably a “sub-set” of women didn’t get icked-out by the stereotypical lab. Whether they could recite lines from “Wrath of Khan” is unknown. Regardless, this suggests to the researchers that we’re dealing with a “cultural phenomenon” that can be modified, rather than something that is immutably set. That’s a relief.
The upshot of this for the researchers is that they feel the image of computer science should be “broadened”, so that “other people feel a connection to the field”. This presumes that, all else being equal, there should be a roughly equal proportion of men and women in most professions. We won’t try to analyze what fundamental view of sex (gender) roles and characteristics this represents, but the objective is clearly to create that equality if for some reason it doesn’t just happen to happen. Oh yes, and there’s also the additional argument that professions where there are such imbalances require “female perspectives”.
The easiest counter-argument to all these assertions would be an essentially Libertarian one, which would eschew any pre-determined, “optimal” gender proportion for any profession, other than that which the market causes by selecting the most successful enterprises. In other words if the “female perspective” created a better computer science, more attractive to consumers, then employers would presumably hire women to address that need. Remember, we’re not talking about discrimination here, it’s just that women apparently choose not to enter the field because of the ick, or geek factor. Over the last forty years, numbers women enrolled have caught up with men in many professions so that, in medicine for example, female enrolment is almost 50%, in individual schools much higher.
What is unspoken in most reports is that the way of judging these trends has not changed over those forty years. Briefly, as long as the trends favour groups perceived to be oppressed or disadvantaged, it’s OK. If the trends favour the “advantaged”, or perceived oppressors - those folks that a movie once said “can’t jump” - then it’s bad. Similarly, if the agility-deprived guys are losing in some area then so be it, so much the better.
So it is that when the percentage of men enrolled in teachers’ colleges reaches as low as 25 % in some colleges and, as this article relates, as few as one out of 27 teachers in a given school are male, the call for affirmative action (or would that be “negative action”?) is palpably absent. Similarly, when female overtakes male university enrollment, and 66% of 2005 graduates in a given state are women, there is barely a ripple of concern.
Ted Byfield of the late, lamented Alberta Report, warned of this trend almost 20 years ago, and the negative effect a generation of under-educated, de-motivated men might have on society. But it is clear by now that what was sold as egalitarianism was simply a promotion of some groups over others. Seeing as gender separation in sports and activities like scouting was assailed to break boy’s/men’s only rules while generally preserving all-female institutions, it should not be a surprise when gender “imbalances” favouring women are met with indifference or affirmation. In fact, attention is often still focussed on the few areas where inequalities seem to harm women.
So it is that if 22% of computer scientists are women, researchers maintain that one must make every effort, right down to dictating the aesthetics of the study environment, to be more female-friendly. On the other hand, while there may be just a little concern that only 34% of California’s college graduates are men, nobody seems too curious as to what is icking them out about academia. Telling boys they can’t be boys likely has nothing to do with it.
