This article titled Where the girls aren’t in The New York Times seems a bit schizo. Check this out:
Mr. Schleunes believes that girls’ reluctance about computer science — their eagerness to stay with ”editorial” functions — is a consequence of social conditioning. He wants to get girls past ”the societal stuff that goes on” about boys’ and girls’ interests. ”It’s not good to ignore the talent of half your society,” he said. ”We are importing computer scientists from other countries because we can’t get enough. Is that a good thing in the long run? If this is a field we would prefer to dominate as a nation, we should be developing more women in the field.”
A nice paean to the idea that it is society’s fault, mixed in with a little mild nativism (kind of like the appeals to suffrage). Now check out this patronizing section:
Last year, Mr. Schleunes conducted a personal case study by retooling the Advanced Placement curriculum, which he thinks turns off a lot of potential students. ”It’s obviously not serving girls if they represent only 12 to 15 percent of the students taking the classes,” he said. ”The environment isn’t girl-friendly. Intelligent, creative girls want to do larger-scale programs that actually do something. They don’t want to look at a logarithm that deals with a math thing and how we’re going to apply it. They don’t like puzzle problems — or they don’t exclusively, and yet that’s a lot of what the Advanced Placement test is about.”
As I’ve said many times-the whole problem with women and technical fields (math & science yes, but also auto-mechanics and what not) is that in my experience, women aren’t wowed by technique. They don’t play with the computer, going where no teacher has assigned homework before. Many of these articles emphasize that it needs to be more “practical” and “social,” basically, prioritize the end products of technical fields rather than the esoterica that exists as layers of abstraction between the undergirding principles and human interface. There is a role for those who don’t find the theoretical underpinning captivating, but there’s no reason to be snide about geeks who find it absorbing either-otherwise, journalists would still be writing up their pieces on typewriters.
Additional thoughts: I don’t mean to imply that didactic methods remain frozen, but these sort of articles seem to imply that the subject that is being studied is almost secondary to the self-worth that the students might gain from mastering them. Certain subjects-those that are heavily math-loaded or have obvious testable outcomes imply boundary conditions in how they can be taught. This is especially true of lower-level courses that present uncontroversial material that is not open for discussion-my freshmen level chemistry sequence for instance had very little debate, but some of the molecular biology and genetics seminars I took later on involved quite a bit of discussion of various alternative models to explain phenomena. The key is you still have to go through the less exciting lower division courses to have any understanding of the more interesting topics in a seminar. That’s what disturbs me about the article talking about how women like to see the large-scale completed programs rather than dealing at the level of individual modules or subroutines (and this tendency recapitulates itself in any of these stories, there is a berating of the attention to technical minutiae and detail that “nerds” tend to display, but is considered peculiar in the general culture). Programmers do plenty of slapping together modules, off-the-shelf-code, etc. (Visual Fill-in-the-Language). But when a problem arises that you have to debug, or you have to go in and stitch the modules together, you need to know the basics of programming on a finer level than high-level architecture. Those who put together large and interesting programs always have to build on smaller pieces of code designed and written by someone else. There is no free lunch. The ultimate aim of having some level of parity might be laudable in certain professions, but one shouldn’t change the standards or methodology to attain that goal.
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