Dumbing down CS for women

Destroying Computer Science, one pet cause at a time:

"The nerd factor is huge," Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.

This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. "They think of it as programming," Dr. Cuny said. "They don’t think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth."

Like others in the field, Dr. Cuny speaks almost lyrically about the intellectual challenge of applying the study of cognition and the tools of computation to medicine, ecology, law, chemistry - virtually any kind of human endeavor.

Geeks, isolated cubicles and staring at computer screens writing code (or making systems behave) is pretty much what we are and do outside of the ivory tower. It's not fair to say that it really discourages men, other than the sort of men who probably would never get involved with it in the first place because men in general tend to be less intimidated by group pressure when there is something they really, really want to do (provided it's a masculinity-friendly profession). When I was in college, though, there was no automatic loss of social status for being a science or engineering major, and I graduated in 2005 so it's not like I lack recent experience here.

The idiocy about this change in curriculum is that they are proposing to do with the sciences and medicine, what Computer Information Systems proposed to do with business--and failed. I highly doubt that a group like the Pandegroup would agree that programming skills are even remotely optional to develop an application like Folding@Home. If anything, the more intense scientific computing requires a very strong understanding of how to use a mathematically-oriented language like Fortran or Matlab. One thing I wonder is, without that sort of programming experience, would such women even understand why they should be using a language like Fortran and not one like C or Java for their scientific code? (Hint: it has to do with floating point accuracy)

If you want to do computing in an area like genetics, you need to get a double major in Computer Science and Biology, then probably follow on with a master's degree in either the hard science or a combined field such as Bioinformatics.

***UPDATE***: I found this comment from Digg to be very amusing in light of the seriousness that ideologically-driven women in Computer Science want more women in for the sake that they want "gender parity." Not everyone agrees:

I am a female Computer Science student. I run Ubuntu. I have at least 6 computers in the house and two laptops. It sucks that my classes have a ratio of 2 or 3 women to 30 men. Oh wait.. Did I say that sucks? Heh heh.

The gender disparity actually works to the benefit of the women in these programs because as long as they keep themselves in decent shape and don't dress like old grannies, there are more of them than there are of us men in the same classes.