kasia in a nutshell

I would agree with this, save for the occasional one enigma that breaks the series. I once went to school with a student that was so bad with technology that she didn't know how to put a floppy disk into a drive. While that's explainable for some students, this was around 1992 (when floppies were very populous) and she was a a junior level CS major.

You misunderstood.. the point wasn't that *all* women in CS are good, just that a higher percentage of women is good than the percentage of men.

The statistic that you presented is surprising but does seem to be true to me. Your observation made me think about the CS guys and girls in my college. And surprisingly, the numbers that you presented were very much representative of what I saw there. Good observation.

I had this whole set of comments typed in here, but then I realised that it simply wouldn't be worth posting them. Not agreeing 100% with the underdog female is not PC, after all. So no comment.

Imho I totally disagree the whole statement. I dont see it in these terms, I dont care the gender of my companions or subordinates, I just care their work quality.

In my experience, nowadays a woman has more chance to climb up in the ladder of any job if she works fine than a man, name it like you wish. On the other hand at least here, a hired woman usually earns a bit less, and thats unacceptable.

Feeling upset in work? thats happens from time to time, male or female, here and there... just tell to the idiot about to smeg off, and forget the moral superiority of minories speech, the elite is always a small number and it does not care genders, ethnics, or anything else, to free your mind about these kind of ideas will make you much more happier.

Looking at the female population in CS in my university, there are basically two groups, which are distributed equally: The talented, driven, hard-working females and the ones who are getting a diploma by using a piggyback strategy, i.e. "I eat lunch with you - you do my homework".

The male population consists of far more not qualified students. I think only 5-10% actually deserve a diploma. The main point why there are much more "losers" in this group is IMHO the following. A girl studying CS has to justify this choice a dozen times. "What? CS? Why aren't you studying something more *appropriate* for girls?" A boy on the other hand how has a even remote interest in computers and decides CS is where the money is, gets affirmed immediately. "CS! Son, that's great. You're going to be a manager, doing ppts ...".

I think the initial barrier to study (and work in) CS is ten times higher for females as it is for males, which is another important factor contributing to the higher average qualification of females.

A coworker (a guy, of course) stated that womens salaries are actually something like only 3% different, and with most polls that's fairly close to the margin of error.

I dunno... at my job, the women are few, but they rock! Actually, I would like to see more of them... it seems to balance out teamwork.

I really don't get the feeling that they want to prove anything to men. They might play up their sexuality somewhat, but its subtle and just about like any guy would play up a specific geekness.

However, we are a young company, so perhaps that's the biggest factor... and as far as outside of IT, women are the majority gender of employee. I'm not aware of any transgendered employees.

Flynn, I've seen the same duality when I was in college, but the 'piggyback' types tend to drop out in the first couple of years.

As a member of SIGCSI (the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education -- part of the ACM) and a former CS educator, I can add something...

One important fact to keep in mind is that the percentage enrollment of women in the CS major is something that changes over time. So any "anecdotal evidence" you have from your own experiences in school will be different from other people in the CS field, depending on when they took courses. The number of women enrolling in CS degrees (as a percentage) grew for awhile, peaking sometime in the 90s. Since then, it has dropped, somewhat dramatically.

Because this number is dropping off, people have done, and are doing, a lot of studies into the situation. I suggest:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262133989/103-2790934-7031852?v=glance

as an example.

(I suppose I could continue to blab, but you're really better off reading the results from the real experts!)

In my CS class, i had about 5 women for the 15 guys (We had small groups)

Of those 5, 2 the first term, with 1 passing the second. And I still am under the impression she was ... aquiring help from some of the smarter people.

Then again, I wouldn't say there were very many people in my classes (guy or girl) who were very good. So my experience probably isn't typical..

Hmm, I seem to have had a similar experience with the gender divide in my CS classes as well.

In my CS 14 (basic C++) that I took last semester, there was one girl who was extremely talented at debugging code (writing I do not know- I think she popped in once in ahile for tests and that was it), while there were some that just came in once in awhile, looked, didn't take any notes and disappeared until who knows when.

Many of the other guys in there with me were ok at CS, or just really downright horrible at writing any type of code..well, as for me (real self evaluation)..I need to stop doing overnighters trying to code a 100pt project that should have been done a week earlier in 4 hours. I'll be a better coder at that point.. :(

There is also a small thinger to all of this as well. At the same time that I was taking CS 14, I was taking Abnormal Psychology. In there, I was maybe one of five guys. The rest were all girls. It wasn't a small class either. In total, I must have noticed 20-25 girls in the class.

I'm taking a computer science course at my high school and there is only one girl taking the class out of about 30-40 students. She's not such a great programmer, although it seems that most of the male students aren't either.

First off, let's not forget that first programmer ever was a woman (Ada Byron).
I'd just like to point out that as a woman in technology, I've never felt that I had to work harder to get to the same place as a man, nor did I ever feel underprivleged in any way. From my experience, I've always had equal opportunities, and did just as well, if not better, then the guys. I'm often the only girl in my classes, but I have never felt treated any differently by instructors or classmates, in a good or bad way.
The head of our department has made frequent requests for the guys to take more showers if they want more girls around....
Check out UBC, a university here in Vancouver, Canada which has an equal number of female CS profs as males..
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/events/openhouse/profile.html

Hmmm... I seem to remember that Ada Byron (Countess of Lovelace, no?) is most noted for her financial contributions to Charles Babbage. Babbage was trying to build his "Analytical Engine" at the time - a mechanical computer (as opposed to an electronic one). This machine was never actually built.

That is, Ada Byron didn't program anything!

There's a rumor that she made other contributions to Babbage that had nothing to do with computing, however.

Are you thinking of Grace Hopper, by any chance?

My sources tell me that:
Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor in 1979.

I go to a military college that was all-male until 1995. The first females that stayed matriculated in 1996. I figure you can guess the college. In the CSCI program there is about a 90% attrition rate after the first year. Out of this, I have no female CSCI classmates (2005) and very few are in the program at all (4 tops). One is from the Croatian Army. And as for the "good boy csci majors" there really aren't that many, about 1 or 2 per class. Oh yea, and I did a report on Ada Lovelace once, the iliegitamate child of Lord Byron. She was the first true programmer, and Babbage (who only has a store chain named after him now) was probably more interested in his cooky engine than any "other contributions". On a side note, I've only met one female in my life (in person) who could code, besides here at school. The ones here at school do the technical stuff, if that, but thats the same as the male side of the board.