tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3910151387003534275.post7874266664827789371..comments2015-10-18T00:31:45.164+01:00Comments on The Psychology Super-computer!: Why should we focus on women in STEM?PsychED_Clairehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08341841866726056665noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3910151387003534275.post-13665762947691251942015-10-18T00:31:45.164+01:002015-10-18T00:31:45.164+01:00As an older professional running a small software ...As an older professional running a small software development company I've thought about this problem a lot. Certainly back in the 1980s when I was a junior coder the sex ratio was about 70% men, 30% women, but now 95% or more of coders are male and I don't think that's a good thing.<br /><br />However, in the case of coding where I think it's maybe starker than in other STEM subject (but similar), I don't think there's a workable solution that's going to make more than a 5 or 10% impact on those figures. With coding the problem is that it's a skill, and one that requires both extensive practice and acquiesce of knowledge to master. It's also extremely unforgiving, in that to a much higher degree than other subjects unless you get code correct it doesn't work, and no amount of fudging will make it work 'well enough'. Really to code at the level which produces business-useful software (that is to write the equivalent of Wordpress, rather create a few Wordpress pages) you have to have spent a long time developing and debugging code, making mistakes, learning algorithms, techniques, good practices and design methodologies. That is generally getting your 10,000 hours in. <br /><br />That's not to say there's not a large community out there that won't help you. But when it comes down to it there's simply no shortcut to putting the hours in. You have to learn to think like a coder, and there's simply no quick way to that.<br /><br />So why is this a gender problem? Well I don't think it was before the mid 80s, because anyone taking CS as Uni was unlikely to have had much experience of coding before they arrived and it was a level field. However around then, and increasingly more so into the 90s and beyond, PCs became available and for a certain type of geeky boys, days and days were given to learning how to code and manipulate software. The result was by the time those boys hit CS classes at 18 they often had three or four thousand hours of development time under their belts. Enough that they could breeze through assignments at many times the rate of less experienced students, almost always the girls. There's no amount of 'extra help' that can solve this, like learning a musical instrument good instruction makes the path easier, but there's no substitute for practice. <br /><br />In recent years there has been a bit of a trend towards encouraging girls with things like 'Girls who code' and the like. The media seems to love them. They're fine as far as it goes, but the impression is relentlessly given that you can learn how to code with a few classes. Well you can, in the same sense as you can learn how to order a beer in Spanish after a few lessons. The issue is that real software development is then the equivalent of writing a novel in perfect idiomatic Spanish. A class or two won't help you and we're effectively lying to many of these girls.<br /><br />So the only way to solve the problem of more girls in development is both to encourage them to take an interest in the subject in the first place AND then provide a social environment where it's acceptable for some girls to spend their mid and late teens obsessively developing computer code in their spare time. I'm sure there are a great many girls than there are now who would do this if it wasn't for gender expectations, but no amount of sticking plaster is going to otherwise solve the issue without that fundamental shift in gendered behaviour. <br /><br />Incidentally, presumably the fact that 80% of your psychology undergrads are female is also a problem? Could there be something similar there in the practice and encouragement girls get to analyse human interactions before they reach undergraduate level?<br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com