Other blogers on: women in CS
Looks like I'm not the only person to be writing about women in computer science. My friend Andromeda has some thoughts on the matter, talking about why she didn't enter CS.
Also, Bruce Byfield talks about the reaction to an prior article of his about women in FOSS. The comments are especially... interesting:
Thanks for the shout-out!
Thanks for the shout-out!No problem. Merely returning
No problem. Merely returning the favor.
Ow. Byfield's comment thread
Ow. Byfield's comment thread is...special, huh. It reminds me of being in college, and the occasional really loud party that got a noise complaint, and a lot of people reacting along the lines of "what's their problem? We're not hurting anyone, we're just having fun." Well, yeah, your intentions may just be having fun, but that doesn't mean your impact is, or that other people might not view situations differently from the way you do. And yeah, you do bear some responsibility for the way your actions are perceived even if it's not what you meant. So many of those comments seem to have the flavor of blaming women for not wanting to participate, or saying "I don't do anything overtly sexist on purpose so what's their problem?" Way to miss the personal vs. institutionalized part of the OP, dudes...That last bit, about personal
That last bit, about personal vs. institutionalized sexism, is huge. I have to admit, first, that it took me a *long* time to realize that there is actually a difference between the two. I know now that people who study such things use terms like 'sexism,' 'prejudice' and 'bias' in specific and technical ways, but I used to think that they were essentially interchangeable. And since they were most commonly used as insults, things like 'sexism' and 'bias' must be characteristics of *people*.
Now I know that they don't have to be. They can be, of course, but it was a minor epiphany to realize that sexism can still exist even in the absence of individual malice. Sexism can be an emergent behavior that manifests in the behavior of the *system*, not the individual components. In a way, I'd hope computer scientists to be *more* aware of this, not *less*, since the same phenomenon occurs in computer systems. (When you start talking about things like security and correctness for computer systems, the system is very different than the sum of its parts.)