Maybe this is a bad idea, but I’m unable to resist poking this particular hornets’ nest. (I’ve poked it before, after all.)
There’s a post on Slashdot reporting that GNOME got 181 applications for Google’s Summer of Code from men and zero applications from women. As a result, Google has seen fit to mount a Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006.
But here’s the “value added” to this information by Slashdot:
Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?
“Most any science department will tell you” this how, exactly? Have they actually methodically collected data, sought to remove biases from the data collection and analysis, etc.? (Maybe they have; so where’s the link to the study?) And come on, a lot of science departments (or rather, their human members — the ones with mouths that can tell things) will also tell undergraduates that there’s a critical shortage of Ph.D. scientists in their field (all the while keeping the Ph.D.s rotating through the nth postdoc safely out of view). How is this piece of purportedly common wisdom more authoritative?
The suggestion of the Slashdot post is that Google is being unfair to that excess of men of sufficient interest and involvement who, by right, ought to have first crack at the Summer of Code. But see, Google isn’t running Summer of Code to reward all the computer-savvy men of a certain age for their coding genius. Google, last time I checked, was running a business — a business that might just be offering an experience like Summer of Code to cultivate a future workforce. In fact, here’s what the Summer of Code Student FAQ says:
The program’s goals are to inspire young developers and provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer, and to support existing open source projects and organizations. Since we’re looking to find developers around the world (many of whom may have considered creating open source software but havent yet taken the plunge), we felt that concentrating on the student population was a good place to focus our efforts.
While mad coding skillz may be important here (insofar as they could help “support existing open source projects”) , there’s no reason to think that these are the only relevant factors — either from the point of view of inspiring young developers, or from the point of view of growing a vital nerd workforce of the sort Google might like to draw on down the road. This is analogous to the “building a class” approach colleges and universities take — and that they took even before the efforts at outreach and diversity that wronged nerds today decry.
Given how tetchy people get if one even floats the possibility that some kind of sexism might be at the bottom of the underrepresentation of women in computer science and similar fields, it’s striking how the very existence of outreach to women is tagged as sexist with only a wisp of common wisdom to bolster that tag.
But maybe the good folks at Slashdot are just hoping to spark a reasoned debate that might lead us all to re-examine our own assumptions on the matter. Yeah, that’s probably it.
As people say, welcome to slashdot. Don’t look for anything objective and rational there. The summaries are often deliberately inflammatory. (See the GW article on there earlier.)
On the other hand, in the UK at least there is a problem of a so called gender gap between males and females in higher education, which is most apparent in the sciences. The problem appears to also exist worldwide. http://www.eric.ed.gov/sitemap/html_0900000b80121212.html
Considering that GNOME is a user interface, it actually makes a lot of sense to get women involved. I can’t cite any data on this, but it would seem that when it comes to designing user interfaces, you would want to have a diverse population involved. After all, intuitive usability is the main determinant of the success of a user interface, and there could be systematic gender differences in what seems intuitive to people.
This debate has also has arrived to the spanish slashdot (barrapunto). The arguments are the same used with “ubuntu women” and “linux chicks”: if there aren’t girls in software projects, it’s because they’re not interested in. But why this lack of interest? This question almost never appears. And it’s important because all of the social issues behind the answer.
please, edit linux chicks. I mean linuxchix. I did the wrong google!
In Norway women outnumber men in higher education.
Men still dominate in the natural sciences though:
http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/04/02/40/eksuvh_en/
I’ll add a different inflammatory twist to this statement:
1. Coding software ain’t science. It’s engineering. There’s a huge difference between computer science and writing programs, not that Slashdot readers are aware of it.
2. I’m in a science department. I was surprised my first year here when I walked into my first intro discussion section: 15 women, no men. Walked into my second: 14 women, 1 man. The bias is going the other way in biology.
Oh, and biology actually is a real science, unlike that code bashing the desk jockies do. Maybe women are skipping out of the Google games because they’re too smart for it, and are pursuing bioinformatics or molecular biology or biochemistry instead.
will also tell undergraduates that there’s a critical shortage of Ph.D. scientists in their field
This is something that bugs me. It’s one of my pet peeves.
I’ve seen a number of people who implicitly measure the success of their undergraduate physics program (physics being what I’m in) by the fraction of students who go on to grad school. Now, I have to be careful here: I think it is good to celebrate the students who go on to grad school. But I also would like us to celebrate the students who go on to other things, especially who go on to teaching at the high-school level.
I would like to see more people major in physics at the undergraduate level– but we do not need more people getting PhDs in physics. What we really need, in my opinion, is more people in the general public, not enshrouded in the world of research physics, who know more physics, and can help communicate a general broad understanding of it.
I also would like us to celebreate PhDs in physics who go on to teach high school! (My mom is a PhD in entomology, and taught high school for decades; it’s a very reasonable career choice.)
It bothers me that departments are always trying to find ways that they can admit and have more graduate students. That’s one of the way faculty are judged for success at tenure and other times– how many grad students have you advised and “produced”? It’s something that shows up in department plans: increase the number of grad students we’re funding. It’s something that shows up in all evaluations of program quality (number of grad students produced– although, to be fair, where they go next is also considered, and *that* is relevant). It’s something the administration (at least at my school) wants to see (although they won’t support more grad students for TAs).
Is this really reasonable? Is this really fair to the graudate students, given how amazingly difficult it is to get a permanent job in what they’ve worked towards? It might be fair if we didn’t have the ethic and training in grad school that “success” means “permanent academic or national lab research position.” As it is, though, we put too many through.
…and I haven’t even commented on gender, so let me throw this in: in a physics department, I’m sensitive to this sort of thing. But I can’t help but notice that every time there is a Linux Kernel Summit or anything like that, one quick look at the picture of participants will show you that it is tremendously male dominated. Now, I haven’t done statistics, but I have met women who have mad coding skillz, so I know there’ out there. What’s the deal?
-Rob “writes blog-length rambles in comments on other folks’ blogs” Knop
Important correction: the funding for the outreach program is coming from GNOME Foundation, not Google. (Please edit your post; non-profit foundations can use all the publicity they can get.)
This is analogous to the “building a class” approach colleges and universities take — and that they took even before the efforts at outreach and diversity that wronged nerds today decry.
We should decry non-academic qualifications for admissions. Their original purpose was to limit the number of Jews attending universities once Jewish quotas were eliminated, then they were used to limit the number of Asian students, and now universities are starting to use the “building a class” approach to justify favoring male admissions because the male/female ratio is tilting in favor of women. See Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen for a recent book on the subject.
Trackback failed, as it always does from my MT install to your site. Dunno where the problem is.