Stardate 20020130.0813

(On Screen): This just in: computers are not grrrl-friendly. (Which might be a surprise to the members of the bellicose women's brigade, or to the millions of women who use computers every day.)

Actually the problem is sexism in design and engineering. The great patriarchal hegemonic conspiracy is working to keep control of the universe by excluding women from the ranks of the computer wizards. They shall be kept users, never permitted the skills of design. Thus shall they remain subjugated to our will, for they shall use computers only as we evil males permit them to with the software that we write. (Cue evil laugh.)

And how are we executing this terrible plot? By slanting the way that Computer Science is taught towards how guys think, away from how grrrls think, thus dissuading women from entering the field. Oh, the fiendish subtlety of it all! Of course, the solution is obvious: change how the field is taught to make it more grrrl-friendly.

Is anyone surprised to learn that this was published in the San Francisco Chronicle?

It's trash, of course. I'm sorry, but it's complete fantasy. I have worked with (and for) many women in this field and have not noticed any substantial difference in capability. Just like everything else, some were outstanding, some were incompetent, and most were in the middle. Which describes the men I've worked with, too. I noticed no important difference in talent mix among the women I've worked with than among the men.

It is true that men dominate the field, but to try to blame this on how courses are taught in college is preposterous (if for no other reason than because a substantial number of practicing software engineers didn't actually study Computer Science in college). Computer science isn't about sexual differences; it's mathematics, and mathematics is what it is. It stands apart from our culture. We don't change calculus to make it grrrl-friendly, and the idea of somehow changing how a course in data structures is taught for that purpose is equally unreasonable.

Is anyone surprised to learn that this study was conducted by two women? Or that one of them lists "gender socialization and education" as her first "research interest"?

The methodological problems with this study are manifest: it's based entirely on the experience of students at one single university. From that they are extrapolating to every university and every part of the field.

But the real one is that when two researchers spend four years on a study, they have to find something. No-one performs a study like that only to conclude at the end, "Nothing here, move along." Nobody gets any points for negative results. Having invested that much time and effort, they had to write a book and it had to conclude that there was a problem.

It's amazing to read the blatant sexism of some of their conclusions:

Margolis and Fisher found that women tended to be more concerned with the usability and usefulness of a computer, while men focused more narrowly on the technology itself and spent more time inventing features for their own sake, rather than to serve a particular purpose.

Any generalization that broad is virtually certain to be false, but regardless it's unlikely that they could have proved such a thing by studying 100 students at CMU. And even if it had been correct about students, that would have told them nothing about experienced practicing software engineers.

Despite the fact that both men and women share an interest in computers -- even though they may differ in their reasons -- universities have historically developed computer science courses with men in mind.

"The culture of computer science has been built around male preferences," Fisher said, pointing out how introductory courses in computer science hone in on very technical aspects of the field.

Women might also feel more intimidated when they perceive their male counterparts to be more tech-savvy. Margolis said that many female college students interviewed for the book expressed a loss of interest in computer science that really turned out to be a lack of confidence.

"...that really turned out to be..." In other words, the women students told them that the classes were boring, and the researchers decided that the students were wrong and that the real reason ran deeper: the women felt intimidated, only they didn't really know that this was their problem. (Hell; I felt intimidated, too. Finite State Automata scared the hell out of me. But I'm glad I studied it.)

The goal of a technical education is to give students the specific knowledge that they need to perform in the field. Computer science is a rich, intricate and complex field, and without that knowledge you cannot perform in it. Everyone coming out of college better know how parsers work, and how compilers and interpreters work, and how to traverse a tree, and how to implement a hash function, and they better have a pretty