But in my opinion, schools should not gear programming courses to favor a certain gender; a better response would be to create a culture that is supportive / inclusive towards everyone entering computer science and to have resources available when people need help.
Now this is fine in a vacuum, but when you put students with different experiences into one room, the ones with prior experience will naturally tend to do better. This relative lack of experience is often misinterpreted as a relative lack of ability or aptitude by the students with less experience, even if their potential is equal if not better than their more experienced peers.
Since gender currently correlates with experience, one way to help balance things gender wise is to even the field wrt experience. This is something Harvey Mudd has done well. (Granted, their stats will be inflated since Harvey Mudd is an excellent STEM school that attracts some of the most technology inclined female students in the country to apply).
I guess I would ask for your basis for this comment. Unless I'm completely off-base on current teenage culture, kids who sit at their computer to program all day are pretty much universally shunned in high school whether a girl or boy. At least at my high school, the advanced math classes were pretty much 50/50 split between boys and girls and I'd argue passing AP calc in high school is 90% of the battle. If you can tackle that the basics of programming are nothing.
>This relative lack of experience is often misinterpreted as a relative lack of ability or aptitude by the students with less experience, even if their potential is equal if not better than their more experienced peers.
I guess I don't get where you're going with this. The teachers will expect you to complete homework and tests. If you're saying professors are somehow making girls feel bad if they go in and ask for help on problems, you should be reporting that to the university. I appreciate the opinion but it feels like a huge reach. CS101 is literally as basic as it gets. If you've passed advanced mathematics and are lost in basic programming, CS probably isn't the best profession. I REALLY am struggling to believe the next Diane Greene missed the boat because they couldn't make it through intro to programming.
I cannot for the life of me grasp this insistence that we have equal representation across all professions from both genders. It turns out males and females literally have difference chemical make-ups and gravitate towards different professions naturally.
If there are women truly being discriminated against, as insinuated above, by something like a professor not giving them the help they need - let's absolutely address it. Fire the professor, sanction the school, throw the book at them. If the issue is "there's way more boys than girls applying for X degrees" - who cares? If they aren't being actively discriminated against, stop trying to force the issue. Let people pursue the professions they enjoy and stop being so caught up in the breakdown of what they naturally drift towards.
> If you've passed advanced mathematics and are lost in basic programming, CS probably isn't the best profession.
I think you're vastly underestimating the benefit of preparation, especially an advanced form of thereof. CS may also require more preparation than other fields do due to its inherent unintuitiveness. The gap between those who dabbled enough to get the basics and those who have never seen it before is rather large.
CS 101 is not basic. Even a high school CS class is not basic. Especially at some places. You're lacking perspective here.
> I cannot for the life of me grasp this insistence that we have equal representation across all professions from both genders. It turns out males and females literally have difference chemical make-ups and gravitate towards different professions naturally.
Many people are not ready to simply accept the latter conclusion because of recent history. Most of those people are similar to the same people who have found that kind of conclusion to be false previously.
I had literally 0 CS prior to college. I am not a programmer and have no desire to ever be one and I would likely be a mediocre programmer at best if forced to do so for a living - CS101 was literally the easiest class I had in college. If you're claiming it's not basic I guess we're just at an impasse. I have NEVER met a person who failed out of CS101 and had any place trying to become a professional programmer. I assume you have statistics backing up this wide swath of the population who have failed out of CS101 due to a lack of previous experience who have gone on to be successful programmers? If not, you are making such a massive leap of faith - you're right, I can't get there.
As for the conclusion, based on what? You've got scientific evidence proving the chemical make-up of men and women are identical? You're rejecting... reality? I assume you're advocating millions of dollars be pledged towards the funding of a program to increase the population of male nurses, correct?
What exactly does 0 CS mean? If you've never picked up a programming book that doesn't mean you had 0 CS exposure, 0 CS exposure is if you've never seen a computer and never reasoned about a logical system. Extremely rare among programmers yet actually not at all uncommon among many people I grew up around.
If CS is so basic, why are there so many people who can't understand for loops? How often do we kick a person to the curb if they can't immediately understand simple algebra or don't instantly figure out how to read? Is simple algebra basic? Is reading basic? How long do those take? How hard it is to teach reading to a person who has never read? Among those who have never read, are there going to be a few who'll pick it up quickly anyway?
It seems you consider it simple because it was simple for you. Maybe you got the one 101 CS class that was actually reasonable? "CS 101" isn't a monolith, there are many of them across colleges and programs, and some programs have improved on the matter.
> I have NEVER met a person who failed out of CS101 and had any place trying to become a professional programmer.
Well, that's kind of a self-biasing conclusion, isn't it? And it's not going to be very encouraging to any kind of person to fail a 101 class in a field.
I don't trust any one person to decide who has a place to become a professional programmer so I don't see that as any sort of evidence or an argument. People not being able to see potential in other people is old news.
In every CS class I've been in there was a huge disparity between those who have coded before and those who haven't, and it was only greater in the earlier classes. That disparity was not replicated in other classes. Those who have coded before could effectively do nothing and pass the class with flying colors while the rest barely scraped by. I have taken multiple high school CS classes due to school jumping and every single CS class had this effect. No, not hard evidence, but something you don't seem to be mentioning at all, and I've heard similar reports from lots of people.
> You've got scientific evidence proving the chemical make-up of men and women are identical?
We're not discussing whether or not they're identical and never where. We're discussing whether or not they completely and utterly explain the current gender disparity. That we do not know and will not truly know for a very long time.
Assigning various things to gender differences has a very bad track record in history, which is why many of us will be skeptical of that easily available conclusion for quite some time, because there are other forces and motivations at play.
I don't need to prove that something isn't true. The onus is on you to prove that it is true.
You're generally not arguing in good faith, which, unfortunately, casts doubt on the sources of your convictions.
And everything after that at my university was pretty tough, although not always because the material was tough, more that some of the professors were there more for research and less for teaching and it was pretty obvious (one even said it flat out in class one day).
As a math major who took on programming later in life than most, I feel a lot of ambivalence about this statement. Data structures and algorithms, and even basic control flow, is more complex than I think you're making it out to be.
Zed Shaw made an excellent point about this when he wrote about the "pipe" for boolean OR. He pointed out that you aren't just teaching people about boolean logic. While they're trying to understand the concepts, they are also wondering what you mean when you say to use the "pipe". In fact, you can't even say use the | character, because very intelligent people may have never used this to the point that they weren't aware that there was a | character, yet these people could make exceptional programmers given a bit more time and the right intro material.
This isn't just a nitpick, I always cringe when I people downplay the rigor of programming, even basic programming. It isn't easy at all, it takes hard work. My own experience as a math major who took on programming a bit late in life is that there is a pretty tough hurdle at the beginning (one that I felt Zed identified very well through his "pipe" example).
I also think that people should take more pride in learning to program - while we could quibble over what the "basics" are, I'd put it up there with my more rigorous math and engineering coursework.
As someone who was programming long before I took AP Calculus, I don't think there's a whole lot of relationship between the two. Certainly, the scope of AP Calculus includes material which is necessary preparation either fairly directly or through other math that builds on it for some of what is covered in a normal CS curriculum, but its certainly not a prerequisite for either basic programming or introductory computer science (which aren't really the same thing.)
It's easy for CS teachers to get boys excited by introducing a new topic with something like "these algorithms are important in VIDEO GAMES!" Boys are vastly more likely to play video games than girls, so this example will likely be much more motivating to boys than girls.
Girls are often socialized to highly value a career that helps other people. An example like "these algorithms are important for helping doctors determine which patients have cancer" may be more inspiring to them.
As parent said, all it matters is writing code and if women aren't interested in that as much men typically aren't in professions usually filled by women, that's their choice.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Demograp...
"While 48% of women in the United States report having played a video game, only 6% identify as gamers, compared to 15% of men who identify as gamers. This rises to 9% among women aged 18–29, compared to 33% of men in that age group."
They might play a game now and then, but women are less likely to identify themselves as "gamers" or to think of gaming as a part of their identity. When we think about creating an inclusive environment where students can see themselves in the career, this is the sort of statistic to consider.