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posted by on Friday December 23 2016, @02:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the barbie-dolls-are-a-bad-influence dept.

A revolution is under way in the teaching of computer science in schools in England - but it risks leaving girls and pupils from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities behind. That's the conclusion of academics who've studied data about the move from ICT as a national curriculum subject to computer science.

Four years ago, amid general disquiet that ICT was teaching children little more than how Microsoft Office worked, the government took the subject off the national curriculum. The idea was that instead schools should move to offering more rigorous courses in computer science - children would learn to code rather than how to do PowerPoint.

But academics at Roehampton University, who compile an annual study of computing education, have some worrying news. First, just 28% of schools entered pupils for the GCSE in computing in 2015. At A-level, only 24% entered pupils for the qualification.

Then there's the evidence that girls just aren't being persuaded to take an interest - 16% of GCSE computing entrants in 2015 were female and the figure for the A-level was just 8.5% . The qualification is relatively new and more schools - and more girls, took it in 2016 - but female participation was still only 20% for the GCSE and 10% for the A-level.

Why is it girls are not attracted to computer science? Is it some deeply embedded gender bias, or something else?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Friday December 23 2016, @07:02AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Friday December 23 2016, @07:02AM (#444970) Homepage Journal

    There was complete gender equality in computer science before 1980s. In fact, there were more women in computer science than men. The gender disparity has come exactly when PC became famous and were marketed to middle class men.

    At some point of time we have to accept that women are not 'oppressed men', but they are independent class of people with different needs and different priorities. Unfortunately we live in an environment where questioning feminist dogma equals hating all women.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Friday December 23 2016, @08:07AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Friday December 23 2016, @08:07AM (#444985) Homepage Journal

    "There was complete gender equality in computer science before 1980s. In fact, there were more women in computer science than men."

    What planet were you on back then? I've been programming since the 1970s, and I have never seen anything close to the same number of women and men. In the 1980s, in certain limited groups, maybe 1/3 of the people were women - that was the peak.

    Anyway, it doesn't matter. As always, equal opportunity is important, equal results are irrelevant. Treat each person as an individual, ignoring irrelevant attributes such as eye color, hair length and genital plumbing. If more women, or blue-eyed people, or tall people migrate to certain professions, no one should care.

    Here is a long but interesting rant on the subject of gender equality in computer science. [status451.com] tl;dr: Because CS is suddenly cool, "It’s just like high school all over again. The jocks and normals and cool kids are coming to beat us up and take our stuff."

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday December 23 2016, @08:48AM

      by cubancigar11 (330) on Friday December 23 2016, @08:48AM (#444988) Homepage Journal

      I am from planet earth and I look at data. Here is some data: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding [npr.org] That is the average - in reality there were plenty of places, specially academia, where women were in higher numbers. Now I don't agree with the conclusion of aforementioned article which blames everything to video game as per latest feminist hysteria, but there was NO discrimination against women in CS.

      Anyway, it doesn't matter. As always, equal opportunity is important, equal results are irrelevant.

      Too late to say any of that [cornell.edu]. The goal was always to bring unequal opportunity [nih.gov] in the name of equal outcome. As per WEF, the most gender equal countries are countries with more women than men [wikipedia.org] when in reality the normal unadulterated ratio is 950 women per 1000 men (0.95).

      Then WEF says this:

      A country, which has higher enrollment for girls rather than boys in secondary school, will score equal to a country where boys’ and girls’ enrollment is the same.

      • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:11AM

        by bradley13 (3053) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:11AM (#444992) Homepage Journal

        Nice graph in the linked article, but it appears to agree with me, not with you. You said that half the coders were women before 1980. I said it peaked at more like 1/3 in the 1980s. According to the chart in your link, the peak was 37% in 1983/84.

        As for the equal opportunity (rather than equal results): I actually do believe this will be coming back. The progressives have had their day, and the pendulum is swinging back. Just as an example, my university is holding a series of workshops on the topic of making CS more attractive. When the women (it's only women) running the workshops presented their interviews with existing students, it turned out that they had interviewed almost exclusively female students. I called them on this blatant discrimination, they apologized, and the workshop discussions did not thereafter focus on women. This would have played out differently as recently as 2-3 years ago.

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        Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
        • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:54AM

          by cubancigar11 (330) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:54AM (#445003) Homepage Journal

          You are right about that graph.

          But it doesn't matter if the pendulum swings back - that means we are not actually not making any progress. True progress is made when (sorry to continue using this awesome analogy) the fulcrum is moved. And for what its worth, the fulcrum/center was always about men giving away to women. Chivalry, the word, is not something progressives invented. They just demanded for it, and may be have pushed a tad too much. True equality is not chivalrous, and that is not going to happen.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by TheRaven on Friday December 23 2016, @09:48AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday December 23 2016, @09:48AM (#445002) Journal
    Before the '80s, programming was seen as an offshoot of secretarial work, so women were pushed into the subject. Afterwards, it was seen as an offshoot of engineering and so women were pushed away. If you're Runway1956, none of these social pressures exist and it's all because girls are different.
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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Friday December 23 2016, @10:57AM

      by bradley13 (3053) on Friday December 23 2016, @10:57AM (#445006) Homepage Journal

      "Before the '80s, programming was seen as an offshoot of secretarial work"

      Says someone who apparently wasn't alive, or at least not programming, before the 1980s. Flip through the pictures in this timeline [computerhistory.org]. Women did data entry, but the people doing the technical work were mostly men. There was a whole slew of articles a couple of years ago, attempting to re-write history. [stanford.edu] Their source was apparently a puff piece in Cosmopolitan from 1967 [thesocietypages.org].

      It was a nice try, but it's still not true. I started programming in the 1970s, and my dad (born in 1933) was a self-taught programmer beginning in the late 1960s. From what I saw of his work, and what I experienced myself: There were individual exceptions, but overall men were the programmers. Women did a lot of data entry. On the development side, you found women mostly in supporting roles, like tech-writing or testing. That's the way it was, and wishful thinking won't change it.

      Large numbers of women first entered into computer science in the 1970s, peaking in the 1980s; this has declined since. Why? My personal theory is that there was has been too much pressure for achieving equality of results (equal numbers) rather than equality of opportunity. "Is she competent, or a diversity hire?" Competent women have to prove themselves over and over again - not because we discriminate against women, but because reverse discrimination has given incompetent women qualifications and jobs for which they are not qualified. Totally counterproductive, and demoralizing as hell for those women who genuinely are competent.

      --
      Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @07:12PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @07:12PM (#445160)

        1985-2000 was sort a golden age for UX as the personal computing industry took off, followed by the dotcom era of the Internet, where it was common to handcode HTML and Javascript or use relatively straightforward tools. The technical side for many jobs could be picked up in a few weeks, perhaps with the help of a weeklong training course which usually cost slightly north of $1K.

        There were lots of women as well as men in their '20s involved in writing shrinkwrapped software, and in web site development.

        After the dotcom crash, I think a lot of them moved on to different career paths.

    • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday December 23 2016, @11:09AM

      by cubancigar11 (330) on Friday December 23 2016, @11:09AM (#445008) Homepage Journal

      If you're Runway1956

      :D

      none of these social pressures exist

      Let me guess, "social pressures" are how patriarchy oppresses women.

      it's all because girls are different.

      Last I checked it was the feminists who were claiming that [theguardian.com]. So when are the liberals going to fight patriarchy to punish women just as much as men? Ans.: Never, because patriarchy and feminists are prostitute and her agent fighting for bigger cut.

      Social pressures exist on men just as much on women. You know why men were pushed into engineering? Because engineering has always been seen as a physically laborious job with high risks of accidents. The very push to have more women in CS is EXACTLY because laymen are educated enough to know CS jobs require sitting down for hours and getting paid heavily. But feminism is all about finding new and novel ways to see women as victim and get some freebies thrown their way for it.