Communications of the ACM
Furor on Claim Women's Choices Create Gender Gap in Comp Sci
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A year ago, Google fired an engineer who had circulated a memo questioning the company's efforts to recruit more women, suggesting that the efforts wouldn't work and that there was no large-scale problem in the tech industry with regard to its treatment of women. Many in academe were among those who condemned the memo and said that higher education could play a key role in attracting more female tech talent.
Now a new manifesto against diversity efforts in technology has been published, and this one comes from a faculty member at the University of Washington. It suggests that efforts to recruit more women to become computer science majors are doomed to fail, in large part because of what the author sees as personality differences between men and women, and based on women's choices.
By focusing on "equity" (trying to even out the share of women and men) as opposed to "equality" (making sure that all are welcome), academe is wasting time and money, says the essay.
The author is Stuart Reges, a principal lecturer at the university's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. Reges argues that women are in fact welcome in computer science and that discrimination does not explain their lower numbers. Rather, he writes that there are differences between men and women than are at play. "The entire goal of achieving gender diversity makes no sense unless you believe that men and women work in fundamentally different ways," he writes.
From Inside Higher Ed
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