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NYT: Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold

Jens Alfke: Computer Science’s Image Problem

If I ever want to get a graduate degree in Computer Science, here are three schools I won’t consider: Harvard, Brown, Carnegie Mellon. These are really unfortunate for me. My wife did her graduate work at Harvard, I live in Providence (home of Brown) and one of my undergrad degrees is from CMU and I consider it my alma mater.

These schools have dumbed down their CS programs in an effort to attract more female students by disassociating programming from Computer Science. Excuse me? Computer Science without programming is just a confusing mishmash of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics with some data structures thrown in that you’ll never, ever understand because you don’t know how to program.

I’ll admit that the only reason I got a CS degree is because I wanted to do cool Internet stuff. I really don’t have any interest in CS as a research endeavor. I already knew how to program; what I wanted was the theory to back it up. CS made me an infinitely better programmer but left me completely indifferent to research. I suspect most professional programmers are the same - at least all the ones I know are.
So, the goal is to increase the number of female students. The means is by reducing the programming aspect. Anecdotally, professional programmers have little interest in pursuing CS for academic reasons.

These programs will be graduating more females (good for them and for us), but they won’t be great programmers because of the diminished the role of programming (bad for us). Additionally, the males who went to school to become better programmers are ill-served (also bad for us).

There are 3 important components of CS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and PROGRAMMING. If you drop the last component, what you’re getting is a double major in EE and Math; not a degree in CS.

Don’t get me wrong: getting more women into technical fields is a noble goal. The problem here is that the root cause for their absence from these fields is a societal one. It can’t be solved by dumbing down the academic programs. That is a disservice to everyone. The NYT article even points out that a lot of outsourcing is due to a lack of local talent. How does this approach increase the local talent pool?

You want to fix this problem? Go after the cause. Tell girls that math isn’t hard; science is fun; engineering builds the world. Change attitudes, not academics.