Denne funksjonen er fullstendig ubrukelig!
I don't know about you guys, but here at Microsoft we hear a lot about “diversity in the workforce“. It's something I think about rather a lot -- it's hard not to when you work with smart, talented people who were born quite literally all over the world. Strolling east to west along just my hallway I pass offices of coworkers who grew up in Jordan, the United States, Canada (that would be me), Italy, England, Mexico, India, Russia, the Philippines, and Australia -- and that's just one hallway!
Across the hall from me there are a series of signs written in English, Italian, Arabic, Chinese and Norwegian giving translations for useful phrases, like "this feature is totally unusable!" and "Where the hell is Andrew? I need that spec by Thursday!" Yesterday a bunch of us got into a conversation over lunch about historical and modern differences between Islamic and Italian banking systems -- which is actually more interesting than it sounds. One of my favourite perks of this job is that I get to work with people of such varied life experience brought together by a common passion for developer tools -- it certainly is odd how life works out, isn't it?
That's not to say that this isn't a little worrying though. Two things worry me. First, recently naturalized Americans and/or foreign nationals (like me) are expensive -- I have a stack of green card paperwork in my filing cabinet that I wouldn't want to drop on my foot, and the lawyers who produced that paperwork didn't come cheap. Second, men outnumber women on my team even more so than the foreign-born outnumber the domestic-born. My team has women in all disciplines -- development, testing, program management, user education and product management -- and they are all talented, smart, and fun to work with but for some reason there simply are not very many.
Why so many foreign nationals? Why so few women? Hard questions. I don't know the answers. I thought I might poke around the web and see if I could find some data.
I found this fascinating table which lists the number of computer science graduates in the United States broken down by degree, year and sex since 1966:
https://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf02327/pdf/tab44.pdf
Here's a graph of Bachelor degrees awarded by American universities in CS/Math each year from 1986 to 2000. (I was unable to find more recent figures -- if anyone has them, I'd love to see them.)
Two trends immediately come to mind. The first is that, though there has been a considerable recovery since the immense trough of the 1990's, the United States is still pumping out fully ten thousand fewer people per year with CS/Math degrees than the 1980's. (And that trough confuses the heck out of me. There was massive investment and huge buzz about information technology in the 1990's, fortunes were being made and yet students fled the field in droves, only returning when the bubble was about to burst. Why?)
The second trend, is that the percentage of CS/Math degrees granted to women has fallen every single year since 1985 (except for an insignificant bobble in 1991), falling from 39.5% to 33%. 2000 was worse than 1966 on a percentage basis!
Clearly this data has something to do with the fact that I work with so many foreign nationals and so few women. But the above is a pretty facile analysis of very thin data, I know. If any demographers out there have better data, or explanations of what's going on here, I'd be interested to hear your opinions.
Comments
- Anonymous
March 12, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
During the 90's, sure all that infrastructure was being built and all that buzz about technology, but it wasn't "cool" to be a computer person, and computer people didn't get mondo salary packages. CS became appealing because of the bubble. "Wow, computer people are making zillions of dollars off of stock options. I want in on that!" These aren't necessarily people who actually like or are good at CS. They're in it for the money. It's all about fashion and money. - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
When I got my CS degree in, let's see, must have been '95, we had a sorta CS group meeting at the beginning of school... I remember being impressed with the number of women in the program. After Programming101 (whatever they called it which, at that time, was a C class) I would say at least a 1/4 of the women had dropped out. By halfway through, at least another 1/4 had dropped out... by the time we walked up to get our diploma, I remember there was only a handful of us ladies left.
Why? If you ask me, from a purely personal observation standpoint, women tend to not think in the analytical fashion that getting a CS degree requires... either that or they get bored with it much more quickly than other areas of expertise concentrating more on traditionally female traits -- like occupations that are more feelings based. Though it is completely unfeminist and certainly I would and will be roasted by plenty of female peers, I don't think CS, at least, will ever become saturated with females... I actually think it is a genetic difference. I'm not claiming to be some uber-woohooo--cool female for having graduated with a CS degree but myself and many of the female programmers I know tend to also have many other stereotypical male traits or tendencies... For example, I don't clean my house or do laundry..my husband does ;) - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
I think Raymond might be on to something -- it makes a lot of sense that degrees are a "trailing indicator" of economic trends, probably trailing by about four years in fact... - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
What percentage of foreign nationals are women? Could an increase in fn result in a lower percentage of women? - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
Just a side note: in Estonia the trend is opposite. The number of CS graduates is increasing, but because of the different sad reason. Due to some political cause our educational system is being constantly devaluated. Initially it took 5 years to get BSc and 2 years to get MSc in CS. Then it was changed to 4 + 2. Recently it was changed to 3 + 2 to comply with some standards. Everyone’s happy now – we have bigger amount of graduates and number of MSc-s is constantly increasing, but unfortunately nobody pays attention to the value of this degree anymore ;-( Guess that’s one way to solve the problem of not enough CS graduates ... - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
I've been thinking a lot about this recently, given that I'm a woman who at one point, majored in CS, but left college to come to msft. I think one of the reasons I was so disenchanted with my CS classes (or perhaps school in general?) was that it seemed such a narrow focus. The CS track was about coding, not developing software.
I also tried MIS but apparently MIS is about learning how to use MS Access and a "gooey" (http://blogs.msdn.com/kclemson/archive/2004/02/17/75283.aspx).
Whereas I loved my sysadmin job. I managed servers and clients and people and processes and fixed things that broke across all of those areas. I did still write some code, but almost always in order to solve a problem - the end goal is the solution, not the code.
Plus, as a woman in CS, it is sometimes tough to find a study partner who wants to actually study. :-) I'm only partly joking, really. The pressure and fear of letting down your gender by being anything but brilliant are perhaps self-imposed, but no less real. - Anonymous
March 12, 2004
There is a lot of other kind of work available which women might find more to their taste.
CS (BTW it isn't) is perhaps not structured in a way that appeals to women. They might not get their intellectual kicks the same way as men do.
BTW. The Norwegian title caused total confusion for me. It was not what I expected/wanted to see at the top of that page! - Anonymous
March 15, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
March 17, 2004
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
December 31, 2007
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