Thursday, March 15, 2012
Women Chose without Force
Right now, women enjoy the freedom to chose to be a computer science major or not. Ron Wyden ventures to guess in his paper Title IX and Women in Academics that women are forced out of computer science by lack of equal access and discrimination. This is not true. Women have found other majors of more interest to them. You can't force women to study what they don't want to study. One sided incentives for women in computer science would not improve the drive necessary for women to compete in the fast passed software marketplace and would be discriminating against men. There are many majors that men shy away from, not because they are discriminated against, but because they are less interested. Men and Women are naturally different with different interests and goals. We should not force them to be the same. The educational freedom women have now are equal to men and should stay that way.
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I agree with your basic point. People should be free to study what they want, and variation in genders should be expected as a result. But the odd thing is that the gender ratio in computer science is so *extremely* skewed, and more so than it used to be, that one can't help but wonder if there's more to it than just interest in the course content. We ought to be asking ourselves, if women don't *want* to study computer science, *why* don't they want to?
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