Adds Chen, “While I fully support methods that earn the field a second glance — encouraging students but women in particular to consider computer science when societal notions and the lack of role models seem to suggest otherwise — we should make sure not to lose sight of this more intangible, more important goal of feeling respected as promising academics by their peers.” As a former computer science student myself, I can attest to the importance of intangibles — but also of numbers.
When I started college, I was hoping to double-major in English and computer science. I chose Stanford in part for its strong CS program, and my first semester, I was excited to enroll in the university’s large and popular introductory CS class. My professor in that class was a woman; so was my TA. But I was still one of very few women in the room. In 2010, about 8% of undergraduate computer science degrees went to women — I graduated in 2005, and that number sounds about right. I learned later that some women in predominantly male areas of study feel that they need to tamp down their femininity –- I did the opposite. I wore a lot of lipstick and miniskirts and, somewhat incongruously, I insisted on eating Pop Tarts in class. At the time I thought I was being rebellious, like if I was going to stick out I might as well stick out all the way. Now my rebellion looks pretty silly, but it’s sad that I felt I had to rebel at all.
I actually loved programming itself, but I ended up quitting computer science at the end of my freshman year. This was partly a decision about time. I wanted to be able to write fiction, and to work for my school’s newspaper and other publications, and to have fun, and I knew I couldn’t do all that and get a computer science degree — not when my introductory courses were already requiring all-nighters and older students were dropping pounds because their advanced classes left no room for eating. The computer science major was notoriously all-consuming, and I wanted to be able to do other things.
But I might have made a different decision had I not felt so strange in my CS classes. To be clear, I never suffered discrimination in these classes, either from faculty or from fellow students. No one ever implied that I couldn’t do the work, or that I was less capable because of my gender, and aside from perhaps a few conversations about the gender skew of our class, I don’t remember the issue of my femaleness ever explicitly coming up. But I felt it keenly, and I remember that it was a relief to find myself in English classes where I no longer stood out as different.
One thing I learned from all this is that numbers are an intangible. I can’t really tell you why it bothered me that my CS classes were only about 10% women, or why it made me feel like I should put on a skirt too short to bike in. But bother me it did, and while I’m glad that I got to write and take English classes and work for papers and ultimately do a Classics minor (possibly the opposite of computer science), I sometimes wonder how much gender really factored into my decision. Especially since I later learned that after “there are no girls in computer science,” the most common comment about gender in the major was, “all the girls leave after their first year.”
I agree with Chen that retaining women at all levels of engineering is important, and that women need to be respected as well as simply represented. At the same time, I think that sometimes representation can breed respect. And it can give rise to something else — the comfort that comes from feeling like you belong. We can’t really be sure how much this comfort matters until we provide it — and while Harvard may be getting closer, computer science as a whole isn’t there yet.
Not So Fast, CS [Harvard Crimson]
Record Number Of Women Declare CS [Harvard Crimson]
Image via Ilja Mašík/Shutterstock.com
