There was an article on Digg a while ago about how we should get more women and minorities interested in tech and CS. The main consensus in the comments was that women should be responsible for getting themselves interested. I have to say they have a point. All these articles keep saying how women are pushed out of tech careers because people discourage them. Have any of you ever been discouraged from pursuing a career in tech?

The only thing that may have deterred me was the all male dominated classes in HS. Sitting in a room with all boys at the height of their immaturity: NOT FUN. If any of you remember, I was forced to take junior engineering before I could take the programming course my school offered. I got to sit at a table with all freshmen boys and listen to them discuss the red head’s fire crotch all period. Not to mention their incredible level of stupidity that managed to take me by surprise daily. Not just them, but our teacher too. Dude, if you don’t know how to use a ruler, you shouldn’t be teaching a technology course. On the bright side, they all thought I was a genius. The programming class was better, but I was still a little lonely without any girls to chat with. College was infinitely better, but the classes were also a hundred times harder.

What do I think keeps most women away from CS. They think it’s too hard. I would tell pharmacy students, bio students, and chem students that I was a CS major and they would say, “omg, that’s so hard!” I’d be like, are you freaking kidding me??? CS is hard, but it’s not that hard. They purposely make the second class for the major impossible to weed out the non-serious students, but after that, it’s easier. They never even get to the second class though. The first one’s hard enough for them. Why? I guess you have to learn to think in a certain way and if you never did programming before, it can be difficult. Most girls aren’t exposed to programming pre-college, so that could make it more challenging. They don’t go to computer camp and take CS classes in HS. Not just because they were filled with male geeks, they probably weren’t even interested in CS and never even bothered to think of taking a CS course.

Why the lack of interest? Girls are very social, especially in HS. Programmers aren’t known to be social people. Girls want to work in groups and discuss things. When you think of CS the first thing that comes to mind is a guy alone in a cubicle coding away. Most of the girls I know in CS are either a little socially awkward or get along with guys better than they do with girls making them suitable for picking up CS earlier on. That or they’re really good at math and wanted to make money or they’re genuinely fascinated by CS.

This particular article said that if we could get girls to think of programming as more of an art than say math, they may be more interested. I say, have kids take mandatory HS programming courses. They can split the class up into groups and each group designs and builds whatever sort of program they want, something fun. Sure the real world isn’t like that, unless you work at google anyway, but it may be enough to get girls interested. Once something’s fun and interesting, it becomes easier to learn and the hard isn’t so hard anymore. They’ll think, hey, I can do this fun thing for a living and make money, maybe I’ll try that!

There’s no need for special programs just for girls and minorities because they’re not at a disadvantage. They have the same opportunities to study CS as the white nerds do, they just don’t take them! They don’t take them because they don’t want to! Our only obligation is to help them see that it can be fun and interesting, as opposed to hard and boring, so it becomes something they would consider studying.

–edit– I should do more of these posts, I had no idea people would actually read this! To respond to some of the comments:

There is definitely a lot more group work in the real world. I hated in most of my CS classes, we couldn’t ask anyone else for help with an assignment because that would be cheating. Ridiculous! We helped eachother anyway, but it only works if you have friends in your class. If you don’t know anyone, you’re at a disadvantage. This is another reason why there should be more group work in school.

A lot of engineering and computer related jobs are out sourced in the US and it can be hard to find a job in the industry

That’s another problem. A lot of people think it’s hard to find a job, but it’s really not! Not enough people are going into CS. A lot of companies are getting desperate especially for girls/minorities. I had absolutely no job experience and I got a job like that *snaps fingers*. Well, maybe it was a little more difficult, but I had two offers before I graduated and my friends had jobs lined up well before that. Even the guys.

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