The Way Colleges Teach Computer Science Hurts Women

Note to Self

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4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2014

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Only 12 percent of computer science majors are women. That's appalling. It's a shame, a waste and many other nasty words. But it is not hopeless.

Harvey Mudd College turned around its computer science gender problem with a concerted effort to quash what they call "the macho effect." A few vocal students who learned programming in high school can dominate and derail a class for everyone else. Those students tend to be male.

But as the college found out, it is not a zero sum game to serve those coding naturals and also lure in newbies, who tend to be female as often as male. There's more to it, of course, and it's a nuanced game to cut down on the macho without cutting out the well-meaning enthusiasm that causes it.

This episode is about how they did it, and what it teaches us about gender and learning. One sample lesson: when computational thinking is framed broadly, about solving problems, about helping society, then just as many women enroll as men.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, friend. This is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City.
0:06.6	Same good content. Just the old name. Enjoy.
0:14.7	Hi, it's Minu Samarote and this is New Text City and we've got an encore episode for you.
0:20.1	The story of how one college quadrupled the number of women majoring in computer science in three steps.
0:27.7	Many of you told us you loved this show because it is pragmatic and practical.
0:33.8	So real quick before we start please take a second to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review if you're feeling it.
0:40.2	And now the episode let's call officially the way we teach computing hurts women and someone found a solution.
0:49.4	Let's start here. I'm sitting in the back of a typical freshman year college computer science class.
0:59.8	The classes in the coding language C++ and there are one, two, three, seven women here in a class of 21 men.
1:09.5	Where are all the other women?
1:11.3	Let's say, well, that ratio is actually pretty good by national standards and not typical here at Hunter College in Manhattan.
1:20.2	Not anywhere in the US. Only 13% of our students are women of our majors are women, but a math is over half.
1:29.6	And this is a trend that's around the country where we have women are just not interested in majoring in computer science.
1:35.6	William Sack is heads the computer science department at Hunter College.
1:39.4	And when I met him at a cocktail party a couple of weeks ago, he was frustrated about what he called his department's gender problem, particularly since computer science enrollments in general at colleges soared last year going up 22%.
1:54.1	More guys, but not as many more gals.
1:57.5	Sack sees the difference between the female students he does have and male students right off the bat once they complete their first assignment.
2:05.7	So the first program that almost everybody writes is called the Hello World program where you get the computer to print out the message Hello World in a programmatic way almost universally it's wow that's cool.
2:16.8	I mean, everybody gets that I think the difference is is that the male students look around say, well, how exactly did that happen?
2:24.2	Where is the women students probably look at it and say, Oh, wow, that's cool. What else can I do?
2:29.0	Now, of course, not all men think one way and women think another, but that difference in perspective that Sack is describes in his computer science students is common enough to cause a domino effect.
2:41.4	Right now, the computer science curriculum at most colleges plays to the standard male students in clination courses focus on how computers and code work.
	...

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