A recent New York Times article, Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold, discusses what college programs are doing to attract women in the field. It also has much to say about job availability for both sexes in computer science.
“People think there are no jobs, but that is not true,” said Jan Cuny, a computer scientist at the University of Oregon who directs a National Science Foundation program to broaden participation in computer science. “There are more people involved in computer science now than at the height of the dot-com boom.”
And there is widespread misunderstanding about jobs moving abroad, said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington. Companies may establish installations overseas to meet local licensing requirements or in hopes of influencing regulations, he said, “but the truth is when companies offshore they are more or less doing it for access to talent.”
“Cheap labor is not high on the list,” Dr. Lazowska said. “It is access to talent.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for computer scientists in the United States will only increase in coming years, Dr. Cuny said. “If you look at the demographics of the country, if we are not going to get our new professionals from women and minorities and persons with disabilities, we are not going to have enough.”
The “nerd factor” is a problem, and turns off more girls and women than boys and men. Another problem can be linked to the AP curriculum.
The Advanced Placement high school course in computer science may be part of the problem, according to Dr. Cuny. “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.”
Carnige Mellon University is doing what they can to combat the trend, attracting and admitting more women. Their attempts are documented in the book Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. Even more is needed.
Dr. Lazowska and Dr. Blum [of Carnegie Mellon], 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.
What can we do at Lab?
Posted on April 17th, 2007 by Marty Billingsley
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