Lecture outline:

Computer Science and Gender Socialization

How did students get interested in computing?

• Early childhood socialization –
  • toys - Rheingold & Cook (1975), Nash & Fraleigh (1993), F. Hughes (2003)
  • roaming radius, 2452 vs. 959
    
    
• Parents - Over and over, parents describe their effort to treat their children equally, to support them in their interests. And yet...
  
  
• Role Model
  
  
• Mentors
  
  
• School –
  
  
• High school - peers & pedagogy
  
  
• College - Why they chose it, why they stay, the attraction of programming
  
  

Nature/Nurture Theories - Essential vs. social construction; innate vs. learned….or both? How do they interact?

Unlocking the Clubhouse
- gender patterns at Carnegie Mellon University

Compare both:

Malaysian gender dynamics in computing

Malaysian Attitudes

Confidence in competency...

And Malaysian grades...

Why?

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich (2000)

"The relative contributions of heredity and environment to various human attributes are difficult to specify. They clearly vary from attribute to attribute. So, although it is informative to state that human nature is the product of genes’ interaction with environments (both internal and external), we ususally can say little with precision about the processes that lead to interesting behaviors in adult human beings. We can’t partition the responsibility for aggression, altruism, or charisma between DNA and upbringing…." (28)

--L.Sax, HERI, 1994

• Men’s self-ratings tend toward “above average”, while women’s closer to “average”
• One in four men rated selves in highest ten percent; only one in ten women did.
• Greater percentage of women designate themselves in bottom two categories
• Mean declines are similar for men and women
• Proportional loss of students rating selves “above average” or “highest 10” is greater among women. Thus:
  • Our most confident students in math are becoming less mathematically confident during college
  • The effect is stronger for women
• Magnitude of the decline is greater in more selective schools

Multiple layers of gender socialization

• Teachers’ unquestioned assumptions about male tech superiority, grounded in U.S. culture
• Teachers’ own male gender socialization, interaction with students (perpetuating male privilege, jokes…)
• Pedagogy – teachers often perpetuating male-oriented technology (examples, adhoc comments, rationale)
• Girls/women actual competence
• Girls’ women confidence in ability
• Girls’ desire to fit (or not) social norms about competence with computers (and downplay ability?)
• Parents ?
• Peers ?

So which women are able to persist, and why?

Hard work vs. "Computer Gene Theory"