Thursday, March 15, 2012
Females in Computer Science
During my time at BYU I have never had more than four or five females in any one Computer Science related class. As I have continued in the major that number has continued to drop until currently this semester there are a paltry two females in each of my classes. With around thirty to forty students per class, that brings the average female enrollment to between 5 and 6.5 percent. My thoughts as to why the number of females is dropping is because the label that society wants to put on them. Have you looked at a magazine cover lately? Society expects the females in our society to be skinny, attractive and well dressed. Not that you can't be a skinny, attractive, and well dressed "nerd", but it is harder to get past the nerd part. The expectations that society implicitly sets for females will continue to restrict the number new women entering into computer related studies.
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There's a lot of attractive female nerds. It's just that they are studying something else when they could be studying computer science.
ReplyDeleteThis should apply equally well to any technical field, and thus does nothing to explain the relatively greater dearth of women in computer science. While the expectations of greater society almost certainly have an effect on gender representation in technical fields, the answer to why there are so few women in computer science compared to, e.g., biology, must come from examining features specific to the field of computer science.
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