College dropout wonders why more people don't major in CS

I started on this about two weeks ago, but got interrupted by a combination of workshop and conference travel, doctor's appointments (everything's fine), and the sinking realization that I don't know what I actually want to say. But what the hell, I've never let that stop me before...

Princeton dean Maria Klawe, former president of ACM, former Dean of Science at the University of British Columbia, and kick-ass educator and computer scientist, recently held an hour-long discussion with some uneducated rich guy. Klawe and whats-his-name decried both the lack of interest among incoming college students (especially women) and the low levels of federal research support. The session was covered by Newsday, InternetNews, Eweek, the CRA Research Policy Blog, and even (shudder) Sl*shd*t. There's lots of interesting stuff here to highlight.

First there's Bill's slack-jawed cluelessness about increasing the participation of women in computing.

MARIA KLAWE: Well, do you have any thoughts about what are more effective ways to get more women into computing careers? I mean, one of the things that's really depressing from my perspective is that computer science is the only field in science and engineering where participation of women has gone down over the last 25 years. So, for instance, if you look at mathematics, when I got my PhD in mathematics in 1977, I think it was about 11 percent of the PhDs went to women, and now it's over 30 percent. If you look at undergraduate degrees in mathematics, it's about 45 percent, and it was down around 10, 15 percent.

So in computer science, our figures are now about 15 percent of the PhDs go to women, about 15 percent of the bachelor degree recipients in research universities are women. I mean, it's just unbelievable how bad it is. We're down there, we're below physics in some cases.

So what could we do to bring more -- what would be effective in getting more women into these fields?

BILL GATES: Well, I don't know the magic answer. I think everybody who thinks about the problem says you've got to get the women who are in the field to be more visible and get them --

MARIA KLAWE: No, no, no, no, that can't be the answer. OK, raise your hand if you're a female here. All right. Are we being visible? Are we serving on every committee, going to all the schools?

BILL GATES: Well, it's good, you should keep doing that.

MARIA KLAWE: Yeah, we are going to keep doing it, but I hate to say it --

BILL GATES: I applaud that.

MARIA KLAWE: -- we're not getting anywhere with it.

Allow me to distill that that down a bit.

MK: Yo, Bill! Where the white women at?
BG: Gee, I dunno. Have you tried waving your, um, hands in our faces?
MK: Hello!! Do you see me standing, like, right here?

Perhaps I'm a bit cynical, but this sounds like Bill is saying that the lack of women in computing is the women's problem, not computing's problem. No, no, it's not that people in computing are immature, defensive, overly competitive, and sometimes overtly sexist. Heaven forfend that Mr. Gates himself should actually help the situation somehow. True, the Gates family is hard at work on more important problems, but as the public face of the computing industry, Bill has some responsibility here.

Earlier at the summit, Klawe hit the nail squarely on the head:

But I know from having spent a lot of time both talking to my daughter and her friends, but doing broader research as well, including surveying thousands of high school students, that one of the issues that really stops a lot of particularly young women but also minorities and others from wanting to study computer science is the image of the computing career and what a computing professional is like.

And so just to quote some of the young women I've spoken to over the last 10 years or so, they say things like, "Well, if you're going to work in a computing career, all you're ever going to do is program, it's going to be 24x7 programming, you're going to be pale because you never get outside, you never talk to anyone, and then you have to work with all these horrible other people who don't have a life, they don't know how to talk, they don't even know how to do these things; and besides, it's boring." (Laughter.)

I don't know, anyone out there had this conversation with someone?

I suspect a more faithful transcript would have said "(Strained laughter.)"

To his credit, Bill at least tried to counter this criticism.

I mean, the nature of these jobs is not just closing your door and doing coding, and it's easy to get that fact out. And, in fact, the greatest missing skill is somebody who's both good at understanding the engineering and has good relationships with the hard-core engineers, and bridges that to working with the customers and the marketing and things like that.

And so that sort of engineering management career track, even amongst all the people we have, we still fall short of finding people who want to do that, and so we often have to push people into it.

And so I'd love to have people who come to these jobs wanting to think of it as a lot and exercise in people management and people dynamics, as well as the basic engineering skills. That would be absolutely amazing.

And we can promise those people within two years of starting that career most of what they're doing won't be coding, because there are many career paths, say, within that Microsoft Office group where you're part of creating this amazing product, you get to see how people use it, you get to then spend two years, build another version, and really change the productivity in this very deep way, take some big bets on what you're doing and do some things that are just responsive to what that customer wants.

Oh, joy. After two years of slave labor, I might make a real impact on business productivity tools. Woo. How exciting.

Later, Bill compares computing with sales jobs "where you're always just measured by a number basically, OK, give me a bigger number, and you're not doing anything that's really all that new and different." Apparently it didn't occur to him that these number-chasers are precisely the customers and marketing people that his coders get to talk to after their initial two-year term. This is supposed to be motivation?

MARIA KLAWE: And I have this feeling that there is some correlation between that and the fact that there were tons of TV shows around the time that I was a teenager, but they're still there, about really exciting careers in medicine and law that show women and men having lives and status and doing really important things. And I know lots of lawyers and doctors and I know that I think being a computer scientist is a lot more interesting and a lot better job, a lot more creative than the jobs that many doctors and lawyers have.

Why have we been so unsuccessful in getting the media and particularly Hollywood to create sitcoms or adventure shows or reality shows even, whatever -- (laughter) -- around our field?

BILL GATES: Well, I think it is a tough field, because it involves -- say somebody went over with a bunch of movie cameras into that Microsoft Office building, there would be some terminology that would not make sense --

That's right, because people are stupid! No, Bill, it's because most people in the software industry are glorified factory workers. Highly trained specialists, yes, but in the end, most of them are just putting more bolts on more widgets (and trying to deal with with someone else's crappy widget design) to make more money for people like you. Booooring. Boring boring boring.

Mind you, the work is very important. Widgets need to be built; bolts need to be put on them. And moreover, some people are very good at putting bolts on widgets, and they should be rewarded handsomely for their skills. But it's just a job.

(What's that? Why yes, actually, two years at a startup and two years at Claris, before I escaped back into the Ivory Tower. The less said about StyleWare the better, but Claris was a great company, at least until it got reabsorbed into Apple's reorganization-of-the-month club. The work was challenging, frustrating, and mentally exhausting, but it didn't require (or reward) much creativity. Why do you think I study theory?)

Of course, the same could be said of most medical and legal work, or any other job, for that matter. "Law and Order" doesn't show the endless hours poring over legal documents, filing reams of paperwork, the actual crucial boring grunt work. No, just the dramatic stuff: stories people would tell to their family about if they were personally involved, things they can imagine happening to them. There aren't many stirring stories of heroic derring-do in which the protagonist saves the world and/or gets laid thanks to the well-timed development of a more efficient word processor file format translator. Sure, I've heard a few, but not many, and I doubt you'd want to hear them.

What stories do most people tell themselves about computers? The most common story, of course, is Dammit! This Thing Never Works!, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Bill's company. Then there's Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!, which has its latest Hollywood incarnation in Stealth. All too rarely, there's Oh Wow! This Is So Cool!, although that's usually just a short intro to Dammit!, or Be Afraid!, or both. And that's basically it. Oh wait, there was that recent revival of Revenge of the Nerds and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but that didn't last very long.

This lack of stories is an endless source of frustration for those of us who say Oh Wow! every day. We see power and beauty in computer science, even while we rage against the limitations of the technology that grows out of it. We see our field not (just) as a way to make boxes that beep, but as a fundamentally new way of thinking about the world. We are craftsmen, taking great satisfaction in the structures we build. We drag abstractions kicking and screaming from Plato's cave, and we make them real. We are explorers, proud of our hard-won discoveries but humbled by the depth of our ignorance. We have changed the world, utterly and irreversably. Our influence on your daily life may be less immediate than the influence of doctors, lawyers, politicians, bankers, and soldiers, but it is no less profound. And we are just barely getting started.

Oooh. Drama.

The last interesting point is what Bill means when he says there aren't enough people going into computing. He points out three basic skills that he would love his prospective employees to have. One, quoted above, is people/management skills. A second is a deep understanding of low-level details of how computers and programs really work, which Bill mentions via a back-handed stab at Java. And the third thing? Abstract problem-solving skills. Algorithms. Theory. You know, math.

BILL GATES: ...In a certain sense, yeah, the curriculum has changed, but say somebody came for an interview and they said, "Hey, I read the Art of Computer Programming, that's all I ever read, I did all the problems, I would hire them right then."

MARIA KLAWE: You'd hire them right then.

BILL GATES: Yeah, that's right.

MARIA KLAWE: So would I.

Me too!

Suddenly I'm out of snarky things to say.

Comments

[Jeff P]

OK, so Bill does not have an answer to the question of how to get more women into computer science. What is the answer? I don't know.

I might guess that women are scared off before they start. Whereas in mathematics, all students are required to have some mathematics. When some women take the classes and realize that they do like math and are good at it, they may choose to stick with it. Like green eggs and ham.

If no classes which are labeled as the fundamentals of computer science are required in the majority of high schools (I have no numbers, but I suspect), then women never have the chance to like it.

I guess that men, when in high school / college, somehow more associate with society's view of what a career in computer science is like.

[Suresh Venkat]

Nice screed, and I really liked the last bit about why we do computer science. I might just appropriate it (with attribution of course) for my web site if you don't mind

[Martin]

Speaking of public perception of CS - here in Germany, when people ask me what I do, I used to stick to one of two straightforward answers.

First one basically says 'I am a computer scientist' - Programming, Machines, Code, etc.
Second one is 'I am a mathmatician.' - theorems, proving, puzzling, deep stuff.

Usual answers either: 'Oh, yeah, recently I had this problem, you know, and in my Windows I had a popup that said ... and the Media Player didn't ... while the harddisk did ... - can you fix it ?'. Well - most likely (if it's Win) - no! Most of the time it's broken and I am not (and do not want to be) able to read Windows Error Codes in raw form. The kind of person giving this answer normally belongs to the Damnit!-party.

Another usual answer: 'Uhhh - I was always bad in math.' So far so good - conversation's over. 'Theoretical computer scientist' tends to have the same effect. Most people here are in the "Boring"- and Be-Afraid"-corners.

Recently, I tried a third alternative by just saying 'I am an algorithm designer' (or Algorithmiker in German). This was a hint from my advisor, and that really works better. People usually do not know too much about what an algorithm is, and what an algorithm designer does. So they tend to be interested. In a few cases, however, the impact was so strong that people use it as a nickname for me...

So far there's almost never been a 'Wow, I just saw/heard/read somehting about this, it must be really cool!'. That kind of public perception surely doesn't help attracting women...

[The Great Gazoo]

"I would hire them right then."

you know....I don't think anyone has finished all of the problems in Art of CS. Not even Knuth because, ding ding ding, many of the problems are unsolved research type questions.

[didier]

"There aren't many stirring stories of heroic derring-do in which the protagonist saves the world and/or gets laid thanks to the well-timed development of a more efficient word processor file format translator."

Darn, the truth is out. Expect enrollment to continue going down.

At its worst CS is the envious little brother of mathematics. At its best it's endless source of amazement, as you put it so well.

[FemaleCSGradStudent]

Didier, a TV show about computer scientists doesn't have to mimic a 007 movie. It only needs to dispel the notion that a computer scientist is a really boring white guy who sits in his white lab coat all alone in front of his computer for hours at a time. One of the most beloved characters on Law & Order, played by Jerry Orbach, was Detective Lennie Brisco, a divorced father of an alcholic daughter who never spoke to him. A TV show about computer scientists just has to tell stories about *real people* solving *neat problems* so there is no more association with that damn white lab coat.

[John]

I could say pretty much the exact same things about Physical Chemists.

[David]

Who does wear those white lab coats, anyhow? My high school chem teacher wore them, but since then I've met nobody else who I know does -- including friends in chemistry, though they're mostly theoreticians.

My friends and colleagues have mostly decided that I count as a mathematician, despite the fact that I sit in a CS department. Unfortunately, this means that my girlfriend's father thinks I'm destined to go mad, since the only mathematicians he knows about are John Nash and Ted Kaczinski.

[JeffE]

JeffP: High school's probably too late. Why not earlier? Even third- and fourth graders can pick up basic concepts like sorting, subroutines, pipelining, and even recursion. Sadly, it's the third- and fourth-grade teachers (and parents, and school boards) have trouble with these ideas.

FCSGS: Agreed! The trick is to find problems that lots of people find "neat". (RIP Jerry)

David: Ssshh! The monkeys will hear you!!

[Suresh]

Actually bio folks still wear lab coats a lot: I see this in my wife's lab all the time.

[SusanJ]

I'm a female computational scientist (took my first programming class in 1970) and am very interested in this topic. When you talk about what you love about CS (pretty much the same as what I love--making abstractions real probably my favorite) remember what you are doing is very high-level and almost unrelated to building widgets for M$.

It must be that students don't understand that CS is a professional field with all the perks of any profession. I don't think kids aspire to being legal secretaries and medical lab technicians, they want to be lawyers and doctors even though you barely study these fields as an undergrad, let alone in third grade.

I find it hard to believe that the young women Klawe quotes about not want to work with horrible people who don't have a life are going into any technical fields. But--if they are--that's great because I think that's where you'll find the best potential computer scientists.

Why not try recruiting some of those women math majors?

[Rudbeckia Hirta]

My hunch is that the number of female undergrad math majors is inflated by various state and federal requirements that all high school (and now middle school!) math teachers need a bachelors degree in math. In the major-level classes I've taught (admittedly a small sample), a disproportionate number of the female math majors were also in the education program.

Really what CS (and math) needs to do is to figure out what the heck BIOLOGY is doing right.

[FemaleCSGradStudent]

Biology has a huge advantage over computer science. Kids, at a young age, are exposed to things that are cool about biology. They go with their parents to take their dog to the vet. They go to the aquarium. Animals and plants are accessible concepts.

The problems of computer science, as someone mentioned, are not introduced to kids at a young age. It isn't until they are in high school that they often get the chance to write a BASIC or C++ program, and then it's most often too late for most of the girls.

IMHO, the problem of computer science, is that people in the U.S. fear that IT jobs will be outsourced overseas, such as India and China.

Another problem of Computer science is that in the IT industry, older workers generally has a competitive disadvantage compared to younger ones (more energetic, know some new stuffs, ...). However, in some other (say, legal, medical, and finaincial ) professions, experience is a big plus.

[JeffE]

IMHO, the problem with computer science is that people equate it with "the IT industry" at all. That's like equating mathematics with accounting, or biology with farming.

[AjayT]

Perhaps, what's happening to math ( see some findings on parents' gender stereotypes in http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/05/0726math.html ) is happening to Computer Science at a larger scale.

[Mike Stiber]

The really humorous thing is the expectation that Bill Gates might be part of the solution when he's virtually the author of the problem. What other company has so many technical contract employees (AKA, "perma-temps")? What other tech company has so many people working so many hours out of fear of poor evaluations, rather than because they're excited about their work? It's quite a talent, to take such an unrestrictedly creative field and turn it into drudgery.