ElleyKitten's Journal: Women in Computer Science

So, I'm reading this book. Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. This book is the result of the authors spending several years in the '90s interviewing Carnegie Mellon CS students to try to find out why so many women drop out of computer science. The book could have been my college story; despite going to a different school a decade later, I had so many of the same experiences the women in the book did.

I, like many of the girls in the book, started out loving computers. I got my first computer when I was 6, and my dad had one before that, so I literally don't remember a time when I didn't use computers. I had internet before any of my "real life" friends, I played computer games, taught myself web design and BASIC programming. Computers were my hobby, my passion. It was obvious I would go into computer science.

Fast foward to a couple years into college. I didn't like computers anymore. Playing with my computer no longer made me feel like the master of my domain; it made me feel like an idiot. I concluded that computers just weren't for me, and I dropped out.

What happened? Even I didn't know. What I wish I did know then was that my story wasn't uncommon. Woman after woman the authors of Unlocking the Clubhouse interviewed showed up freshman excited, passionate, and smart, but when they were reinterviewed sophmore year, they were depressed, had no confidence in their computer skills, and ready to quit.

There's a lot reasons for this, and I would probably be doing the book a disservice to try to condense them all into a simple little blog. The biggest reason I see though is that women all too often put ourselves down. Coupled with guys' tendancies to put themselves up, and it winds up being a disaster for women's self esteem in a male dominated field. Two female English majors who just got "A"s on their essays can tell each other how they did so bad and how they suck at English and they're fine, but if a female CS major tells a male CS major how that last programming assignment was so hard for her and took her days to complete, and he shrugs it off as too easy and says he only spent half and hour on it, then her self-esteem will just drop right off and she'll doubt she belongs in CS.

I was too persistant to just drop out and let that be the end of it. Six months later, I was back in class, and this past March I graduated. Now I have a job that, for all my compaining, is really a great job. I've got my confidence back in technology, and I love playing with my computer again. I'm not finished with the book yet, but the next chapter is about the positive changes made by CMU since they did their interviews. So, happy endings all around?