Why women don't study computer programming - AAR of my first class

[garbon]

Do me a favor and ask your women colleagues if they went through anything similar, will you? I'm hoping that this was an abberation and not something I'm going to have to deal with in all of my classes.

I don't remember anything like that in my CS classes but then also some of my classes had female professors. We had a lot of female students too.

[Caliga]

There were hot chicks in my Comp Sci classes back in the day.

[dps]

I recommend getting drunk with your classmates.

Yeah, Meri, you buy, and the 18-20 year olds in your class will have no problem with you.

I'm the one raising four kids - two of whom are in college! I'm fairly sure they have a lot more extra cash on them than I do. They should be buying for me! 

Well, my point was kind of that they can't legally buy alcohol.  You can buy it for them, but I didn't say it had to be your money.

[Jaron]

The CS courses I took I mostly did online, thank goodness. They weren't online online classes, but online courses through my university.

Therefore, I never had to interact with anyone in person.

[Valmy]

There were hot chicks in my Comp Sci classes back in the day.

There are hot chicks in my comp engineering class...today.

[merithyn]

There were hot chicks in my Comp Sci classes back in the day.

There are hot chicks in my comp engineering class...today.

Great. So it's just this class. I can live with that.

[Valmy]

Great. So it's just this class. I can live with that.

May just be Illinois and its backwards ways

[garbon]

Great. So it's just this class. I can live with that.

May just be Illinois and its backwards ways

Cruel.

[merithyn]

Great. So it's just this class. I can live with that.

May just be Illinois and its backwards ways

I'll accept that as valid.

[PDH]

There were hot chicks in my Comp Sci classes back in the day.

There are hot chicks in my comp engineering class...today.

Dude, I have been to Austin.  There are hot chicks everywhere.  Probably even the DnD groups have hot players.

[Berkut]

I'm amazed they even tried to introduce a social aspect to programming I suspect after this introduction this sort of interaction won't even bother you when you get into doing some actual programming.

I started my IT degree in 1986, when no-one owned a home computer and the World Wide Web was still three years away, and my class was 50:50 male to female. I found the same ratio in the industry when I joined, with a leaning towards more women in software testing. It'd be sad if that had swung back the other way.

The age thing is a factor at first but soon fades. I've moved into an industry where the next in age to me in my team is 15 years younger and some of my colleagues were born in the 90s... I recommend getting drunk with your classmates.

I think that's shifted quite a bit now, B, unfortunately. It is incredibly rare to find women in these types of classes, as my professor's reaction shows. It seems like the classes tend to cater more toward the hacker mentality now, which most women (and older students) don't really get, or want to get.

I'll stick with this because I want the certificate. I want to learn the job, and this is how I do it. But I'll be honest, the idea of walking back into that classroom again gives me a little bit of a stomach ache. I may cut my hair, bind my chest, and dress in a suit for the duration of the semester. 

Don't you think you are over-reacting and over-generalizing just a teeny bit?

[merithyn]

Don't you think you are over-reacting and over-generalizing just a teeny bit?

Well, based on my experience with a husband who's just gone through the Computer Science program at UIUC (ranked #4 in the country) where women were pretty rare, my personal experience in my class, and a variety of articles out talking about how women are terribly underrepresented in the tech world especially compared to 20 and 30 years ago, I'll go with no, I'm not over-generalizing.

From Wiki (their sources are at the bottom of the article):

In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998.[1] Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women in 2010-11.[2]

Over-reacting to being humiliated in the classroom? Again, no, I don't think that I am. You may have been fine with how things went down had they been directed at you, but I was not. In fact, I was pretty upset for quite a while about it, and am still not thrilled with the idea of going back into that classroom. It was a horrible ordeal, and one that I have no desire to repeat, which could very well happen if I go back.

No sources for that. You'll just have to take my word on it.

[merithyn]

This is kind of interesting. It was on the same Wiki that I quoted above:

Research on the barriers that women face in undergraduate computing[17] has highlighted such factors as:

• Undergraduate classroom teaching in which the "weedout" practices and policies privileging competition over cooperation tend to advantage men.
• Laboratory climates in which women are seen as foreign and not belonging at best, and experience blatant hostility and sexism at worst.
• Well-meaning people who unwittingly create stereotype threat by reminding students that "women can do computing as well as men".
• Strong resistance to changing the system in which these and other subtle practices are continuously reproduced.

Like the pre-college situation, solutions are most often implemented outside of the mainstream (e.g., providing role models, mentoring, and women's groups), which can also create the perception among women, their male peers, and their professors that to be successful, women need "extra help" to graduate. Most people do not realize that the "extra help" is not academic, but instead access to the kind of peer networks more readily available to male students. Many women decline to participate in these extracurricular support groups because they do not want to appear deficient. In short, the conditions under which women (and underrepresented minority students) study computing are not the same as those experienced by men.

[Valmy]

Undergraduate classroom teaching in which the “weedout” practices and policies privileging competition over cooperation tend to advantage men

LOL whatever they have those things on a MUCH larger scale in departments that are dominated by women.

[Berkut]

Don't you think you are over-reacting and over-generalizing just a teeny bit?

Well, based on my experience with a husband who's just gone through the Computer Science program at UIUC (ranked #4 in the country) where women were pretty rare, my personal experience in my class, and a variety of articles out talking about how women are terribly underrepresented in the tech world especially compared to 20 and 30 years ago, I'll go with no, I'm not over-generalizing.

From Wiki (their sources are at the bottom of the article):

In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998.[1] Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women in 2010-11.[2]

Over-reacting to being humiliated in the classroom?

Humiliated? Really?

I rest my case.

Again, no, I don't think that I am. You may have been fine with how things went down had they been directed at you, but I was not. In fact, I was pretty upset for quite a while about it, and am still not thrilled with the idea of going back into that classroom. It was a horrible ordeal, and one that I have no desire to repeat, which could very well happen if I go back.

Was there something I missed in your story?

Nobody talking to you when it came to social time because they are a bunch of ackward dorks is a "horrible ordeal"?