📖Female pursuit of computer science with Jennifer Wang

July 10, 2021

authors: Jennifer Wang
year: 2016
url: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/06/13/female-pursuit-computer-science-jennifer-wang/

Learning computer science is important as it provides a powerful way of thinking, it empowers you, allowing to be more creative, and technology is so widespread today that computer science is useful in virtually any field. Having more women in computer science is a good thing to do because it is important that creators of technologies represent the users, so we advance technology for everyone and not just a selected group. Besides, more diversity in the team leads to better and more innovative problem solving.

The percentile of women studying computer science has dropped by ~50% since 1980s, but this trend might be reversing now.

The two main contributing factors are encouragement and exposure. Girls receive less encouragement for pursuing computer science career and are also less exposed to it. (Lack of encouragement is different from discouragement.)

Two other important factors are career perception and self-perception. A stereotype of a nerdy lone very smart programmer is wrong and is hurting the desire to enter computer science. Although this is changing and many children perceive computer science as interesting and important, they still think that they don’t have enough smarts.

It is also important to note that only ~4% can be attributed to non-changeable factors: things like ethnicity or family income level.

Jennifer Wang co-authored Wang…₂₀₁₅ and this podcast mostly speaks about it.
2:55 why pursuit of computer science by women is important for everyone?
- provides a way of thinking growth as an individual so you can problem-solve
- empowers you, so you can be more creative
- relevant and useful, no matter what’s you field
- it is important for scientists and creators of technologies to represent the users, so we advance technology for everyone, and not only the group who create these things
- diversity leads to better and more innovative problem solving
the percentile of women studying computer science has dropped by ~50% since 1980s (currently, ~20% are women)
- why?
  - one of hypotheses: personal computer started to be more widespread, computer games targeted boys more, so boys got more exposure
are there any
- trends are possibly reversing
societal factors accounting for 95% (for girls)
- encouragement: from family, educators, media
  - huge influential variable for girls (~29% of cases)
- career perception
  - girls have more extreme positive/negative perception
- academic exposure: being exposed to computer science
- self-perception: as someone who tinkers with things, as a problem-solver, as interested in math
encouragement and exposure are the most important things
lack of encouragement ≠ discouragement
- very few boys and girls were discouraged
encouragement is important regardless of parents’ background
families purchase legos for boys but not girls
stereotypes of a nerdy lone programmer
~35:30 the gender gap in computer science in some Muslim/mid-east countries is smaller (even though we have a perception that there is a huge gap there). also, more gender-parity countries like Sweden have a huge gender gap in computer science and some other fields