Tufts: Absurd Affirmative Action in computer science

Tufts University in Massachusetts has more female faculty than male even though the great majority of graduates are male! Below are a few excerpts from an article bewailing the small numbers of women students in computer courses and asking how to entice them into computer courses.

As a long-time academic FORTRAN programmer myself, I do know a bit about where the bodies are buried in all this and the utter blindness of the article briefly excerpted below is stark. They would not of course dream of mentioning that programming is pure intelligence and requires the most rigorous logical thinking -- and at the top level of general intelligence and mathematical ability (which are highly correlated) women are comparatively rare. Given their rarity in the top range of mathematical ability, women are in fact probably OVER-represented among computer graduates -- presumably because of affirmative action. There is of course more to computers than programming, but programming is basic. If you can't program or understand at least the basic technicalities, you are not going to be much use elsewhere. The woman mentioned at the end of the excerpt below exempifies what the problem is: A stark lack of technical understanding and knowledge.

Nothing I have said above excludes SOME women from being good with computers. The person who taught me programming was a woman. But expecting women in general to be as good with computers as men in general are is the height of absurdity. There will be always more men than women in computing while work with computers requires the high level of ability that it does today.

And even in normal everyday personal computer support work, the customers are most likely to be women and the techies men. I myself can not remember a time when any adult male has asked me for help to get his PC working properly but I am always helping women to get their computers to behave


"Today, Souvaine chairs the Tufts University computer science department, which has more female professors than male. But few younger women have followed in her generation's footsteps. Next spring, when 22 computer science graduates accept their Tufts diplomas, only four will be women.

Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. In the early 1980s, it had one of the highest proportions of female undergraduates in science and engineering. And yet with remarkable speed, it has become one of the least gender-balanced fields in American society.

In a year of heated debate about why there aren't more women in science, the conversation has focused largely on discrimination, the conflicts between the time demands of the scientific career track and family life, and what Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers famously dubbed ''intrinsic aptitude."

In the wake of the dot-com bust, the number of new computer science majors in 2004 was 40 percent lower than in 2000, according to the Computing Research Association. The field has seen ups and downs before, and some think the numbers for men will soon improve at least a bit. But the percentage of undergraduate majors who are female has barely budged in a dozen years.

A Globe review shows that the proportion of women among bachelor's degree recipients in computer science peaked at 37 percent in 1985 and then went on the decline. Women have comprised about 28 percent of computer science bachelor's degree recipients in the last few years, and in the elite confines of research universities, only 17 percent of graduates are women. (The percentage of women among PhD recipients has grown, but still languishes at around 20 percent.)

When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist. Her father is a programmer, and she took Advanced Placement computer science in high school. Because she scored well on the AP exam, she started out at Tufts in an upper-level class, in which she was one of a handful of women. The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant nothing to Espiritu. She never raised her hand. ''I have not built my own computer, I don't know everything about all the different operating systems," she said. ''These people would just sit in the front of the class and ask these complicated questions. I had no idea what they were talking about.""

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