Erika Foreman's List: CSC350 Pet Topic

• Professor Terry Winograd opened the first panel of the conference, on Women in Video-Gaming and Virtual Worlds, by asking whether the audience remembered when "gender in gaming" meant adding pink to the packaging?
• Sheri Ray (Executive Director, Women in Gaming International) questioned the assumptions that are made about women as gamers and argued that women are as likely to enjoy "shoot 'em up" games as men.
• Games which expect the user to explore them in order to understand them are, she argued, typically a turn-off for women - while that very feature is what makes them so appealing to most men
• Nick Yee (Palo Alto Research Center) supported Ray's conclusions, noting that he had found an 86% overlap between the interests of male and female players in online gaming.
• Yee thought the gaming industry was doing itself no favors in neglecting the female and mature market.

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• When asked whether they agreed that "the computer increasingly competes with the TV for my entertainment time," 29% of people said they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. Males overall agreed at a slightly higher rate than females

• The number of women in computer-science graduate programs has dropped to the lowest level in nearly a decade.
• From 2000 to 2005, the number of women choosing computer science for their undergraduate degree dropped nearly 70 percent nationwide.
• "For most girls, it may indeed be intimidating to walk into a class of 40 people and see one other girl in the room,
• Despite women comprising 51 percent of workers in professional occupations in the U.S., they make up only 26 percent of IT professionals. In 1996 women made up 41 percent of managers in IT, and by 2006, only 26 percent.

• Government and other experts urge increasing efforts to lure more girls into mathematics and science-related fields and to provide more mentoring for women already working. A woman's perspective in such careers is vital, many say, from software development to product design.

   

  Diverse work force is better

   

  "There is all kinds of research to show that when you have a diverse work force, you get innovative ideas really directed at the needs of consumers," said Patricia Shafer, president of Compel Consulting and author of a 2007 report titled "Women in Technology 2007" that detailed the issue.
• Noting that the problem of diminishing numbers of women in tech careers threatens America's ability to successfully compete in the global market, Congress passed the America COMPETES Act earlier this year.
• Some of the issues dissuading women include work environments not favorable to women, misperceptions that girls do not perform as well as boys in math and technology, a lack of mentoring and family demands on their time, research shows.
• Shafer's report found that about 75 percent of women in technology liked their jobs, but 48 percent said there was inequality that favored men. Only 27 percent had mentoring programs at their company.

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• Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent
• At universities that also offer graduate degrees in computer science, only 17 percent of the field’s bachelor’s degrees in the 2003-4 academic year went to women,
• They say computing is the only realm of science or technology in which women are consistently giving ground
• The big problems, these and other experts say, are prevailing images of what computer science is and who can do it.
• “The nerd factor is huge,
• when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.
• This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. “They think of it as programming,” Dr. Cuny said. “They don’t think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth.”
• “The AP computer course is a disaster,” she said. “It teaches Java programming, which is very appealing to a lot of people, but not to others. It doesn’t teach what you can do with computers.”
• “they get the wrong idea in high school and we never see them to correct the misperception.”
• Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science
• Dr. Lazowska and Dr. Blum, with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Google, are working on materials that high school teachers can use to tell students about the challenges and opportunities of computer science. They are developing them for teachers of math, science and English because, as Dr. Lazowska put it, “many young women have opted out of the field before they even get to computer science” in high school.

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• McFarlane (1990) has argued that since women now account for a very large portion of the workforce and occupy an increasingly important position in the economy, the IT profession needs women in its ranks so that it can really represent those who are carrying out the work.
• Many have suggested that proportional presence of women in higher ranks where decision-making takes place will go a long away toward making the work- place conducive to womens' needs. However, trade journals and academic research alike have confirmed that women in IT fields are concentrated at the lower and middle levels and are under-represented at the higher levels (Frenkle, 1990; Myers, 1990; Marenghi, 1992; Mulqueen, 1996).
• They analyzed the data gathered by the Society of Information Management (SIM) and found that women received lower salaries than men even when job level, age, education and work experience were controlled. They also observed that there were a disproportionately high number of men in the managerial ranks.
• For example, boys are expected and encouraged to use computers both at home and school (Fetler, 1985; Turkle, 1988). Girls, on the other hand, are less likely than boys to be sent to computer classes and camps (Didio, 1996). Also, girls are steered toward softer subjects like liberal arts and literature, and away from mathematics and sciences.
• Further, significant differences have been shown to exist between electronic communication styles of women and men in that women tend to use electronic communication for rapport building and men for reporting (Gefen, 2000).
• men posted more informational items and women more discussion, personal and support items.

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• Men, it seemed, were more likely than women to use advanced software features, specifically ones that help users find and fix errors, called "debugging."
• One theory grabbed her attention: High confidence correlates with success.
• And most studies indicated that women - even ones who study computer science - have less confidence than men in their computer skills.
• Research like Beckwith's may help ensure that when the industry starts adding features for everyday computer users, differences between men and women aren't left out of the equation.
• What's more, making complex everyday software more accessible to women could help get more of them interested in computer science, Beckwith and Burnett believe.
• As it is, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in computer science awarded to women fell from 37 percent in 1985 to 22 percent in 2005, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
• Most gender-gap theories today have more to do with computer science's image as a haven for solitary male geeks
• "The first time you as a girl sit down at a computer to do some real problem solving," Burnett said, "and the software you're using isn't a good fit for your learning style, your problem-solving style, how likely are you to be to say, 'I'm going to grow up and be a computer scientist?' "

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• "There are certainly more students  than in the past," Dr. Camp said. "The  raw numbers are increasing.  

  But the  percentage of women is not."
• Between 1983 and 1996, the percentage  of women earning bachelor's degrees at  universities and colleges in computer science dropped from a high of 37.1 percent  to a low of 27.5 percent,
• The percentages of women majoring in  other sciences, including engineering, biological sciences, physics and math, have  risen from the 1980's to 1996.
• said that there was a substantial attrition  rate for women as they moved through  the computer science career pipeline,  from college to work
• The reasons women leave computer  science are complex, but one cause is  clear, Ms. Gurer said. "The image of the  white, male, antisocial nerd who sits in  front of a computer turns women off,"  she said.

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• But research from the Open University, Bournemouth University and the University of Hertfordshire suggests that girls can outperform boys on computers if the problems they have to solve use less masculine images

• Many factors in and outside the classroom result in girls being turned    away from computer technology (Koch, 1994). These factors include    the media depicting men as experts in technology, societal expectations    of different goals for boys and girls, the structure of learning tasks,    the nature of feedback in performance situations, and the organization    of classroom seating.

• Male Female Percent female
• 7,455,925 10,031,550 57.4

• • Women earn a greater number and proportion of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees than they did about 25 years ago. Between 1979-80 and 2004-05, the percentage of bachelor's degrees earned by women increased from 49 to 57 percent.
    
   
  • Between 1979-80 and 2004-05, the percentage of master's degrees earned by women increased from 49 to 59 percent. Women earned just under half of the doctoral degrees awarded in 2004-05 (49 percent), an increase from the 30 percent of doctoral degrees awarded to women in 1979-80.