Google backs gallery of computer-crazed female boffinry at Bletchley Park Google UK has sponsored a new gallery celebrating the achievements of women in computing at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) in Bletchley Park. Women in Computing Gallery at The National Museum of Computing The new exhibition opened as part of a "Google-inspired Heroines of Computing" event, according to TNMOC*. The …
As we have no uranium mining in the UK, it's not a particularly sensible career for many to aspire to. There are also vastly fewer people involved in uranium mining globally than in computing, probably involved in computing just within the UK, so trying to get women into UK based Computing, which is disproportionately staffed by men is a far better idea.
Or was this just another, "won't someone think of us White Middle Class Men, in our twenties/thirties, we're the true minority" type of comment?
"This new Women in Computing gallery at TNMOC will promote positive role models for women and so encourage girls and women in critical thinking and engineering. It shows the heroines of computing as historic facts to inspire the upcoming generation."
It is my sad understanding that these days, the above is already tl;dr for "girls".
I wish it were otherwise.
I am starting a campaign to get more men into university, don't think I will get much traction tho.
BTW, the women who now attend uni insist on a tertiary educated partner themselves and bemoan the fact there are not enough suitable candidates. Irony much?
Men who get to the top rungs of a line of business tend to be the less desirable examples of humanity e.g. Psychopaths; so we should be glad that we see less women there, because they can be just as bad!
Education was historically a luxury because it was always a consequence of wealth from doing and learning at home and at work, not a cause of wealth; it was no accident that education was a leisure activity for well off Ancient Greeks, and others before modern times. Socialist monsters like big governments fail to comprehend this sequence, so imposed absurd and wasteful changes like over education for all and 'positive' discrimination, so we got bubbles, including an education bubble, this is ironically most obvious in countries like Greece, and painfully obvious with growing university loan debt bubbles in various countries!
As an economy does less well, education take up should shrink, especially University education, maybe boys see this better; another possible reason you see more women and less men in education than before is because there is a proportional wealth transfer from men to women, so girls became more desirable for parents to invest in.
A nasty cost of this wealth transfer is that most women have to work now because most fathers can no longer fund a family house or family alone now, so more mothers have to go back to work sooner and leave young children in the lower quality environment of an expensive nursery.
These bubbles of decadence won't last, because a much delayed (by the FED and others) Depression is ahead, which will collapse these bubbles, and it can't be delayed forever! 2007/2008 was the latest warning of too much stress, and if anything the stress is much worse now!
I'd say just get the best people at the top, regardless of whether you have all men, all women or a mixture. Forcing people into positions is (I think) best done near the top of the management chain, where quota people can do less damage to whatever a company actually is paid to do, but it's such a fallacy. It's also lazy: rather than inspecting who's best for a job and asking why a clearly better woman wasn't given the job instead of a man (this is merit-based, and difficult), people just look at whether or not management's gender distribution is exactly the same as the global population's, which is both not merit-based, and childishly simple to perform.
I still remember that Ruby conference in the UK that was cancelled because all 15 speakers were white males. No suggestions about who would've been better speakers, just random accusation after a child's view of the final statistics. The organiser didn't want any part of this sort of unfortunately fashionable crap, and so cancelled.
As ever, XKCD can have the last word. If you want to be recognised as good at something, whatever gender you are, then just be really interested in it and really good at it, and don't wait for a paternalistic quota to give you a leg up or for society to encourage you to do it. And you may well not be rewarded for doing it; most people aren't. But that won't matter, if being good at it is your genuine goal; you'll just get on with it.
Robert,
If there were absolutely no gender bias (both conscious and unconscious) in society then your utopian world might be achievable. However, parents, teachers, employers, media, board members all exert a bias which is partly why there is imbalance "at the top".
This article wasn't actually about quotas though. It was about acknowledging that women have already played key parts in our computing history and also providing a set of role models for young girls to see and follow if they want. How many men end up doing a job they've never see another man do?
JP
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
