Gender Equity in Computer Science
by Daniel Leclair
Introduction
Women in higher learning computer science classes are under-represented and their attrition rates are appalling once they are enrolled (Miliszewska, Barker, Henderson, & Sztendur, 2006).
I researched the issues of what was happening with women in the computer science field given their low enrollment and the high rate of attrition in higher education classes once they were enrolled. I also inquired as to why women were under-represented in the workplace at only 12% of the computer science jobs ascribed to them. Even more concerning was the lack of female Chief Information Officers (CIO), Chief Technical Officers (CTO), and Chief Data Officers (CDO) in the “C” suites of our corporations.
Research for Fresh Perspective
While doing this research I observed that there were mostly older articles about Gender Equity in Computer Science and few new articles as to what is happening today. I wanted a fresh and today perspective, so I called two women colleagues that I have worked with in the past and asked them for an interview for this blog and they agreed to be interviewed provided I did not use their real names.
Dr. Sue (Ed.D) was a past Vice President and CIO for a major international corporation and currently works at a major university in the Eastern United States with a student enrollment of 35,000. When I called Sue, she informed me that up until a few days prior she was a Computer Information Systems (CIS) professor but had a new job in an executive leadership role accountable for all school operational administrative functions (finance, human resources, lab development / management, IS/IT, student services, faculty services, facilities management, business development, grant and proposal management, marketing, communications, community / industry / CIO relations). She is also responsible for forming a new School of Computing and Information for a university.
I also interviewed Kay who is a current CIO for a not for profit corporation with 58,000 employees / volunteers. Prior to taking this position as CIO, Kay worked for Deloitte Consulting Services helping organizations with the business side of computer sciences and worked at other companies as a programmer /coder. This is the perspective I was looking for.
Why Are Women in CS not at 50.5% of the Population Mean?
There is a continuing concern that women are underrepresented in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) fields and specifically in the computer sciences (CS). The initial issue is that societal constructs dictate what girls should enjoy for work is the main obstacle towards more women in STEM and specifically in the computer sciences.
Studies tell us that most women do not think that the computer sciences is an attractive vocation. They think it is a boy thing. The implicit bias that starts this societal cognition is in place with girls by the second grade and affects teachers also. Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not reachable through self-analysis. (Klawe, 2012).
The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages. In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations. (Stager & Martinez 2013)
Males and Females are all born with the same brain as there is no separate girl brain or boy brain. The implicit bias issues that cause the diminishing of female interest in the computer sciences that is often attributed to gender differences in interests, motivation, experience, personality characteristics, abilities, self-efficacy and socialization. These issues that create disadvantages for females in the computer sciences are attributed to both external and internal factors.
External factors include the delusion that “programming is a boy thing” or the “bro-grammer” culture. The internal issues are inadequate pedagogical and stereotypical attitudes of lecturers techniques where teachers ask more math questions from boys than girls without even knowing what they are doing and putting the girls at a disadvantage. Then there is the lack of role models and proper institutional support.
Students no matter what gender they are want to see someone they can identify with. A positive role model is someone they can aspire to be. (Miliszewska, Barker, Henderson, & Sztendur, (2006) and Sax, Lehman, Jacobs, Kanny, Lim, Monje-Paulson & Zimmerman 2017)
The Interviews
Each of the interviews with Sue and Kim lasted just under an hour each. Both these women are in the 50’s and although they have both had a different path to their current employment, they had very similar experiences in climbing the corporate ladder to be the leaders in their organizations in computer science vocations.
Both these women started with a strong supportive family that told them as children that they could do anything they wanted in life and provided no implicit gender bias so they both started school with a clean slate of a brain. They both also had supportive teachers and at 12-13 years old, where most young women start to lose interest in math and sciences, their support team of teachers and parents did not provide them with the implicit bias of “math is too hard for girls” so they had a great basis for higher education that started back in kindergarten (Stager & Martinez 2013).
They also stated that the computer science “Geek” depiction that is portrayed on television did not bother them as it does most young women. Instead they had great role models to look up to like Grace Hopper who was one of the first women in the computer science field after WWII. Admiral Grace Hopper was known to have coined the phrase there is a bug in the computer when a moth was jammed in a relay causing the computer to provide the incorrect answer. I was fortunate to have met Admiral Hopper at a ceremony at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington DC where her office was in the late 1970’s.
Both women also talked about how women, who typically care for the children, need more of a work -life balance to stay in the computer industry and so introducing the concept of a work-family balance, and reducing the gender earnings gap are all changes that will help women in CS. Kay and I had a long discussion about companies that she helped better their gender equity by being supportive while they were out on maternity leave and being accepting upon their return even if it was after the children went off to higher education. This, she said, reduced the attrition of women coders in the workplace.
Sue described a great movie that really explained Gender Equity in Computer Science. The movie is called Code: Debugging the Gender Gap. The movie is a documentary which focuses on the lack of minorities (including women) in the field of software engineering. The film traces the history of women in the computer sciences, like Grace Hopper and President (Dr.) Maria Klawe Ph.D. of Harvey Mudd College.
Sue also told me that in the early days of mainframe computers, 50% of the people in the computer sciences were women and that started to decrease in the 1980 as prior to that time men built hardware and women did the “secretarial job” of programming them since that was considered administrative. The 1980’s brought out Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and programming turned out to now be cool so the age of the “bro-grammer” was born and computer programming started to be a boy thing. I highly recommend you watch the documentary as it is available on Netflix. (Sue & Kim Interviews, 2017) & (Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, 2015)
Finally, Kim stated that she fell in love with coding during her first semester in graduate school when she took her first coding class. She had a supportive professor that understood that women may not have the previous knowledge in coding that men were afforded and that it sometimes takes the full semester for them to be comfortable with the content knowledge.
Conclusion & Recommendations
A funny thing happened when lawyers and doctors were depicted as normal people with depicting a balance of both women and men in the profession. Prior to that, those two professions were highly male professions and few women associated and wanted to be them. Why, because it was depicted as a boy thing. When TV started to depict those professions homogeneously, then the gender balance started. Why is it important for there to be a gender balance in all professions? Well, over 50% of people in North America are women.
Today, computer science touches all industries. Its products are embedded in our daily lives. Addressing the significant problems of the world from climate change to health care to poverty will involve technology and computational thinking (Google, 2017). I think the future world will be an exciting place and we will see amazing technological developments when we create a much more diverse computer science community.
Bibliography
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