TeachingAcrossTheGenders

Teaching Across the Genders

What is computer science?

"At Bryn Mawr, Computer Science is a program designed generally to explore problem solving using computers. Of course computers play a major part, but computer science is really about the problem solving part."

"Computer science can involve many disciplines, including graphical design issues, mathematics, multimedia, electronics, cognitive science, bioinformatics, geoinformatics, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, technology/social issues, complexity, and a host of other topics."

The Problem

Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities an NSF report

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CRA Statistics 1975-1991

Why are women on the outside of computer science?

Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher.

Identified many factors, but largely:

1. Early childhood gender socialization

2. Adolescence, peer relationships, computer game design, and secondary school social pressures

3. Female orientation towards (and concerns about) computing are at odds from the design of most computer science curricula and its surrounding culture

Early childhood gender socialization

Boys are Doctors; Girls are Nurses.

Boys are football players; Girls are cheerleaders.

Boys invent things; Girl use the things boys invent.

Boys fix things; Girls need things fixed.

Boys are presidents; Girls are first ladies.

From I'm Glad I'm a Boy, I'm Glad I'm a Girl by Whitney Darrow, Jr © 1970.

Boys and computers

1. "The Magnetic Attraction"

2. Computer often ended up in the boys room

3. Father-Son Internships

4. Computer games

Female orientation

Loss of Confidence

"When I have free time, I don't spend it reading machine learning books or robotics books like these other guys here. It's like, "Oh, my gosh, this isn't for me." It's their hobby. They all start reading machine learning books or robotics books or build a little robot or something, and I'm not like that at all. In my free time, I prefer to read a good fiction book or learn how to do photography or something different, whereas that's their hobby, it's their work, it's their one goal. I'm just not like that at all. I don't dream in code like they do."

--- from Unlocking the clubhouse, by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher.

What can we do?

"Survey, talk, listen, intervene"

Meeden, L., Newhall, T., Blank, D., and Kumar, D. (2003). Using departmental surveys to assess computing culture: Recognizing and addressing gender differences. ITiCSE, Greece. Preprint

"There are many important new technology issues specifically web development, web security, new languages such as XML, SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), .. etc which conference attendants will be more interested to hear than the issue and the materials of this paper."

--- anonymous reviewer

Change the way we do business

Blank, D. and Kumar, D. (2002). Patterns of Curriculum Design. Proceedings of Informatics Curricula, Teaching Methods and best practice (ICTEM), Florianópolis, SC Brazil. Reprint

1. Computing across the curriculum---not!

2. Participation in freshman seminars

3. A terminal CS1 course is terminal, for women

4. Upper-level electives are interdisciplinary

5. Humanizing core computer science courses

6. The design of everyday lecture artifacts

7. Breaking rigid topic boundaries

8. Creating room in the curriculum

9. Flexibility in creating a major

10. Minor in computer science for all

11. Support of emerging computational disciplines

Immutable page (last edited 2010-01-18 11:39:44 by AlexLobsters)

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