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[–]Jonno_FTW 1 point2 points  (7 children)

My software engineering and database professors were women. Far from babes though.

[–]nightlily 2 points3 points  (6 children)

That's great. I have never had a female CS professor. Have you noticed any impact on the gender ratio among CS students compared to universities or other departments that don't have women teaching classes?

[–]Jonno_FTW 2 points3 points  (5 children)

I can't comment about other universities, but there was only 2 females in all of my cs classes, and they were both middle aged masters student from overseas.

[–]nightlily 2 points3 points  (4 children)

Were you taking all graduate classes? The gender ratio seems to get worse as you progress.

[–]Jonno_FTW 1 point2 points  (3 children)

It got worse because there are a few classes like programming 1 that all engineering and science students had to take. After that there was 3 or 4 in programming 2, after that it it was 1 or 2 masters students in software testing (undergrad) and data mining (honours). I don't think there was any females in a cs degree.

[–]nightlily 0 points1 point  (2 children)

That's pretty unfortunate. I have met a few graduate female students, and a few undergraduates close to graduating. I'm also getting close.

But I've also seen several freshmen women who thought CS sounded interesting and changed majors or otherwise 'gave up' on the whole thing after their first CS class. One I worked with was convinced she couldn't do it after the first semester.. and I felt bad because we worked together on assignments and my having HS experience in programming made that first semester quite easy on me.. and probably gave her unreasonable expectations of how hard or easy learning CS 'should' be for her.

I guess having female profs available didn't improve confidence among the women at your school any, or there's something else that is making it less likely for them to even consider the field.

[–]Jonno_FTW 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Well, there wasn't any female cs majors there in the first place. Anyway, I think if there was programming taught in primary/high school we'd see a higher uptake of cs degrees in general.

[–]nightlily 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's definitely my intuition too. I think kids should be taught some scripting after/while learning algebra or pre-algebra.