It is. But I think a big part of the reason why this happens is because we steer young girls away from “technical” areas to begin with, and when it comes to racial disparities, we have a tendency to treat early struggles with learning (faced disproportionately by minorities because they are, on average, poorer and less advantaged than white children) as a statement about a person’s “aptitude.” This gets back to the point I made before about how computer programming is miscategorized at the institutional level. It’s believed that you have to be some sort of genius, an overachiever experiencing wild success in regular Math classes, in order to even qualify as ready to learn programming. And honestly, that’s just not the case. If we tore down this conception of the practice, and did a little work to demystify it, it would go a long way toward drawing a more diverse set of people to programming (not to mention other technical fields).
Yep. And teaching basic programming from a young age would help with all of that.
Fortunately where I came from all the white kids were poor too, and I was one of them (heh, still am). What struck me throughout my entire school education is that about half of my peers were barely able to hold a conversation, or read and write. Again it’s easy to forget when you’re in IT that most people are really not very bright at all. I mean, seriously not bright. It’s hard to frame this in a politically correct way, but if you’re using a computer now in a desk job, it’s because you were already in the upper half of the IQ curve. I know it’s not really all about intelligence and that nurture, teaching and opportunity are the other foundations of academic success but as teachers all well know, half of the kids they teach are never going to amount to more than a hill of beans no matter what they try. They can be great teachers, and the curriculum can drop a golden nugget of opportunity, but when half the kids can barely write, spell, or add up by the time they’re 12… eeergh.
Cas 
Depends on what field you’re taking about. It’s obviously an invalid algebraic equality, but it’s a perfectly valid map. Sqrt[-1] is invalid for reals but perfectly valid in some other fields.
CS has a problem WRT women. Percentages peak in the late 80s and early 90s then rapidly dropped. Don’t believe that holds for other STEMs. (saw a graph somewhere…trying to remember where).
It’s funny, my childrens ( 8 years old boy and 11 years old girl) wants to learn programming (seeing it’s father to write code so often has an impact ;D).
I will start to teach this week-end and i’m quite excited since i started programming when i was 7 years old in basic and i’m nostalgic ^^
I agree on one point, childrens construct their hobbies from which they can have access !!!.
If childrens are on an environnment (social, family, country, …) that not help us to have discover the computer sciences, they can’t discover they like it !!
But the problems occurs at a more general level ! when i see so many childrens and families around me without any contact with cultural things like arts, books, sports or even sciences, i’m very afraid…
Séb.
Let see how this pans out.
I’m not in IT. And honestly, your anecdotal reasoning is precisely what we don’t need to be using as the basis for educational policy. I get that you’re being “edgy” here with the jaded cynicism, but it’s not exactly a constructive outlook, now is it?
[quote=“KevinWorkman,post:57,topic:53175”]
Are you still talking about elementary / primary school? If so then the system where you live is clearly very different to the system where I grew up, in which pupils didn’t get any options until they were 13.
I’m probably being too abrasive, but this isn’t anecdotal. Half the kids at school just aren’t that bright and they just don’t even really need to be. You probably don’t hang out with (m)any of them any more because they’re out there doing stuff that doesn’t need people to be all that sharp, while you’re surrounded by clever people. I am aware that this sounds elitist but hopefully I can temper that by saying that many of the people I know are far, far cleverer than me, and the ones who are considerably so don’t bother engaging me in social circles either. We are all stratified by our ability into socioeconomic levels.
As for why there aren’t many women programming… beats me. It’s seriously not as if they are actively or even passively discouraged. They just seem to harbour no interest in it on a general level, much like their remarkable lack of interest in joining the army, or their remarkable lack of interest in becoming surgeons (don’t ask me why). The opportunity is there, and it is equal, and it’s shoved under everyone’s noses the same, at least in the UK here these days thankfully. So given that the opportunity is now the same - for all colours and creeds too in the UK - the lack of representation is most likely genuinely down to indifference.
Cas
You don’t need to be all that bright to program, though. That’s the larger point I’m trying to make. Programmers, of course, enjoy making it sound like what they do is wizardry, but it really isn’t.
[quote]As for why there aren’t many women programming… beats me. It’s seriously not as if they are actively or even passively discouraged.
[/quote]
Maybe that’s how it is in the UK, but certainly not in the US. There is no good reason why there aren’t more women in STEM fields other than that they are enculturated to avoid “male” things like that. And most of the people currently in STEM fields don’t do a great job of making women (or minorities) feel welcome when they do enter into those types of jobs. The misogyny of Silicon Valley is pretty well-known at this point. Just one portion of the industry, but a high-profile one, and I think fairly representative of the whole.
Slightly late to this thread but it reminds me of my nephews when they were young. They did IT at school like everybody else but it had minimal programming content, making a Powerpoint presentation was the only homework I saw them do, and they weren’t bothered it wasn’t any harder. Anyway now they’re in their 20’s they have zero interest in programming at all, it just doesn’t feature in their lives - they were right about that! Neither works using a computer but of course they both have phones and use loads of apps. FWIW they’re not dumb - kind of smart but not particularly, just normal people. I think they’re probably typical.
Maybe it’s a bit like being a car mechanic 50 years ago - everyone liked driving cars but most people had no interest or need to fix the engine. Even less build a new one from scratch.
The only interest those kids ever showed in having a go at programming was when I said we could write a bot to cheat for them on WoW or Runescape! They were playing a lot of those back then Never did that but for a long time I had ideas for a game where the player actually had to write bits of increasingly difficult code to progress. It has been tried sometimes (Robocode springs to mind and Code Hero was a more big budget attempt) but I haven’t seen a really good one striking the sweet spot of moving the player through a structured teaching process without it seeming to be teaching. Hmm, what was that Double Fine one last year - HacknSlash? Haven’t played that but it looked quite promising…I’m a bit out of touch TBH 
The Jobs in that joke are all dependent on the physical strength of the empolyed.
Programming does not need muscle strength. It’s about the brain, and the intelligence difference between men and women is much smaller (=0?) and not so much gene-dependent as muscle strength.
Plenty of stuff in any of those jobs that doesn’t require brute force… anyway, digressing.
Anecdote time. My nephews (3 boys) are all of course completely mesmerised by Minecraft. I’ve tried to see if I can get any of them interested in programming (“Wouldn’t you like to figure out how do make your own game?”). Not even a blip of interest from the younger two; the eldest one (16 now) tried for a few weeks and got bored. Same deal with my neighbour’s two boys. Absolutely no interest in learning how to do it. I actually asked that very question - “Aren’t you even interested?” and the answer that came back immediately was a simple, “Nope.” Not even a glimmer.
Strangely my 6yr old daughter is super keen since I showed her Turtle Academy (as a direct result of reading this very thread). Which is awesome. It’s now her go-to activity to get out of bed time and of course I find it kinda hard to refuse her…
Cas
I can’t comment on how it works where you’re from, but in America, white privilege doesn’t just go away because “some white kids are poor”.
[quote=“princec,post:63,topic:53175”]
I strongly disagree with this. It’s not as simple as “smart people become programmers, dumb people have to be janitors”.
[quote=“princec,post:63,topic:53175”]
But doesn’t that mean that we should give “the good half” the opportunity to try things like programming?
I’m talking about a mix of things. At a bare minimum, I’m saying we should update elementary/primary school “computer class” to include logic and problem solving, using things like LightBot and Scratch. You’re right in that they don’t have a choice, but they also don’t have a choice when it comes to trying art, or trying music, or trying science, because these fundamental skills will come in handy no matter what they do. I include logic and problem solving in that useful toolkit every kid should have.
I also believe that programming courses should be available to high school kids, in the same way that advanced art and math classes are.
(That is sorta the definition of anecdotal…) 
Again, I reject the notion that “smart people work in IT, dumb people become laborers”, and it’s precisely because most of my friends are laborers.
Yes, it is. (at least in America)
And teaching the basics of programming, and making more advanced courses available as a part of the official curriculum, would go a long way in helping with that.
[quote=“princec,post:69,topic:53175”]
Again, I disagree with this as strongly, and as respectfully, as possible.
Women and minorities don’t have a “natural lack of interest” in programming. Their enrollment numbers are so low, because the current state of programming education actively marginalizes them. Sorry to repeat myself, but teaching the basics of programming, and making more advanced courses available as a part of the official curriculum, would go a long way in helping with that.
I disagree with this comparison. Sure, you don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car. But you do need to know how to refill your gas, how to check your oil (or at least get somebody to check it for you), how to drive without killing anybody, etc.
I’m not saying we should teach every single person how to be a google-level programmer. I’m saying we should teach the basics of logic and problem solving, exactly like we teach the basics of other subjects. This will help with general education, as problem solving and logic are useful pretty much everywhere, but also with inequalities in computer science enrollment when it comes to marginalized groups.
I was about to give up and say, obviously we’ve just become entrenched and won’t convince the other side of anything and instead just continue repeating ourselves, so I’m bailing out… but this is awesome.
Anyway, I’m pleasantly surprised that this hasn’t devolved into a flamewar yet. I respect you as a developer so I don’t want to start bickering, but I think you’re “on the wrong side of history” with some of your arguments.
So we have a new teacher , every tuesday in our year 11 computer science class. I’ve seen this all to much a teacher dragged from another subject into something they simply cannot teach, in our computer science department we have 2 teachers who have both got degrees in computer science and vividly enjoy the subject and teaching it. This guy appears to just drag along , I think it’s not that they don’t have the money to do it , it’s just that they do not have the staff to teach it and are instead either pulled from other subjects or are taught to do it monotonously , we have absolutely no recolection of what he went over (servers and server topologies).
One of Code.org’s initiatives is to train non-programming teachers to teach programming, so you’d avoid exactly this kind of situation.
I also think we’d benefit from getting programmers to come in and teach- I’m getting my master’s degree for exactly this reason.
How so ?
Apart from that I think it’s 90% parenting and 10% external social influences.
If you give your 11 year old girl a pc and somehow get her interested in tinkering with it… there you go.
It’s also a very similar stories with women who play video games: Very very often the story is that they were exposed to programming or video games at an early age because the father or older brother was very into it and they picked it up.
Which is of course also true for boys, thats how I picked both up.
But when parents do gender based parenting and dont ever expose their girl to science, engineering or tech stuff… it just doesnt happen.
And I think that the reality: People think girls and boys are inherently different. And I’m very sure it’s all in the upbringing…
But thats why they treat girls differently to begin with and thats why they dont pursue STEM fields because they were never exposed to it to begin with.
I realize this is a whole different topic
And that’s why we need to focus on exposing students to new things, because while we can’t manage what sorts of things are encouraged at home, we can design education to be an “equalizer,” where we don’t make preconceptions about what students are “predisposed” to do, etc. Throwing our hands up in the air and accepting the fiction that a kid is born into a certain situation, and is already on this one predominant path toward X (whether that means becoming a laborer, a doctor, a teacher, etc) is silly, and proven wrong day-in and day-out. There are plenty of people in this world who started one place, and ended up somewhere completely different, doing something they never imagined they’d be doing. Not everybody who grows up in a coal town ends up working for the coal company.
The elephant in the room is that nobody wants to admit that girls and boys are very much different. It really is that simple but in a world of political correctness one is liable to be shot down in flames for pointing it out.
Just as most boys aren’t interested in midwifery and babies, most girls aren’t interested in STEM. It’s nothing to do with parental encouragement. They just find different things interesting. How about you try and encourage more boys into midwifery? No? Not so appealing? Midwives perhaps not seen as useful or worthy, hmm?
Cas
I’m just going to go ahead and shoot you down for that :persecutioncomplex: :
It makes sense that Women do midwifery, because they know the act of getting a baby much better than males and that’s gene dependent.
So how does this compare to STEM? How are genes supposed to influence a human’s interests? The interests are only dependent on the human’s experience and education, not their genes. And genes are the only things that differentiate between males and females