More Depressing News
February 11th, 2005
This C|Net story is depressing reading:
…the female share of bachelor’s degrees in computer science dropped from 37 percent in 1985 to 28 percent in 2001. And while women comprised 33 percent of information technology professionals in 1990, that figure was down to 26 percent in 2002… The drop is puzzling in part because women are making progress in related areas such as the natural sciences.
As Michelle Levesque and I said in an article last year, the situation’s even worse in open source. Hey, I wonder if it’s on the agenda for this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Conference? Hm, they seem to have left it out… again.
blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2005/02/08#a7425
“Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.”
Not sure why this is so depressing. Just the way it is, I don’t place a value on it per se. In the nature vs. nurture debate, having both male and female children, I fall on the nature side.