what if "woman in CS" programs can help to get woman with intellect and passion into CS?
Do you apply this logic to other social groups as well? Any noun? Perhaps being a "software engineer" doesn't make sense if you are already a person.
Women are underrepresented in computer science for a fact, and I have personally experienced little to support either that it is the result of systemic exclusion, a bias against women or otherwise. I don't need several decades of experience in the industry, though, to say that, hey, I will never know the cause by simply evaluating my personal experience. Humble up and don't form a view on a subject if all you have to go by is any kind of anecdotal experience.
As for opposing feminism, do you have any ideas of the implications that movement has on women's rights worldwide? I have no idea what your position on things like birth control, women's suffrage and genital mutilation, or whether you think this is an ongoing battle or not, but I hope you'll agree that at least some good has come out of it.
To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.
We, that is people who work in the field of computer science, need to demand more than guesses and beliefs when dealing with "solutions" to gender inequality. If someone has an ideas on how to improve the community and industry, those ideas need to be first tested and validated using the scientific method. Testing in Social studies are not a new concept, so we already got the tools we need.
If "woman in CS" programs can help to get women with intellect and passion into CS, it should be testable. Do that first, and then argue for it use when there is data backing it up.
That's hilarious. Try to remember this next time you put a print statement in the code or adjust some constant until it's right.
The problem here is that we have no way of either experimenting meaningfully or testing most of the things we'd like to know. We can describe tiny parts of reality and assume that some correlation is in fact causation, but without actually doing something it's impossible to conclusively prove what effect will any one action have.
That's nothing new - and it's not that unseen in programming, either. I think that "waiting for a proof" in this case is just an excuse; we need to get the best approximations, of course, but in the end we just need to find the courage to go and implement a solution without a certainty that it will be the best or even good.
In other words, when your service is on fire because thousands of users want to access it simultaneously (good for you) the first thing to do is to bring it back by any means necessary, including tools like intuition and wild guesses, and formalize the process afterwards.
Or are you saying that these programs need to scientifically prove their value before existing in order to exist?
Your wording is disingenuous. It is possible to run a case study and study on a limited scale a program that would be deployed at a much larger scale.
Your statement implies the idea is tautologically false, which it is not.