www.hackingplay.com/carnegie-mellon-study-on-gender-and-computer-science/
This is a telling article. It demonstrates that the gender gap in computer engineering can be overcome with surprisingly little effort. Decades have been spent cultivating this "basement nerd" stereotype, especially by film and tv shows. The average high school student thinks that engineering requires "the knack" which a few socially unbalanced people are born with. No! Computer science is about real-world applications of beautiful math. Most importantly, good computer science requires the ability to contribute to a team without causing conflict.
Nice find! This article is great. I wish BYU would do something similar. For starters, a woman on BYU's CS faculty would help a lot.
ReplyDeleteStereotypes are a dangerous thing - I've now met so many varieties of "nerd" that I've pretty much given up attaching much detailed meaning to the word. I think society is heading in the right direction on closing the general gap...but we definitely have multiple big pushes left to go.
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