📖Female Pursuit of Computer Science with Jennifer Wang
- authors
- Jennifer Wang
- year
- 2016
- url
- https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/06/13/female-pursuit-computer-science-jennifer-wang/
- 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