Talk:Women in computing

message: Won't add them myself because I don't feel comfortable editing such a collaborative article, but here are several if someone wants to pick up the glove the timeline should really include something about Dorit Aharonov, Dana Moskovich, Orna Kupferman and Irit Dinur. All four are internationally recognized researchers in computation theory.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.65.153.13 (talk) 19:15, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Some missing notable mentions

message: one reads
''
A report from the Computing Research Association indicated that the number recently fell below 20%, from nearly 40% 15 prior. [3]
''
which points to http://www.cra.org/statistics/ from where we can find http://www.cra.org/info/taulbee/women.html
which if you read it does not say about fall but the OPPOSITE!--Nkour 17:38, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Stats

message: Would Mitchell Baker, current President of Mozilla Foundation and CEO of Mozilla Corp count as famous? Frankchn (talk) 05:08, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I prefer the wording "notable" to famous, and if an individual merits a Wikipedia page then he or she is notable.  The real question is: is this page about women involved in computing in technical capacities, or do businesspeople count as well?  I'm not sure I'd include a woman just because she is an executive of a technology company.  There are probably many more of those than there are women who have advanced the art of computing through technical achievements.  Robert K S (talk) 05:14, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mitchell Baker? 

message: Several issues were not discussed as why women may eschew computer science as a career choice.
*Education requirements: A typical computer science  degree on average may take up to five years to complete (the lights rarely go off in the computer labs) and if there ever is a lapse along the way (childbirth, marriage, unemployment, etc.) recovery maybe difficult, especially in a fast changing field. Computer science schools and employers look at any interruptions or gaps in education as a negative.
*Work Environment: Computer science may require 80+ hour weeks (just like college) and telling the employer that you have to take a month or more off for children or leaving work to no less feed a child (or even having a child) will interfere with their dead lines. If there is a project and a computer science person leaves for several months, they would most likely be unusable on this same project resulting in a reassignment to another project. This flexibility requires larger companies with multiple projects and many of those employers are going overseas to do their computer science or cutting back.
*Unemployment, lower pay, and re-education: As computer science becomes more short term "contract" work, women may find themselves in a glutted computer science  market with greater unemployment, lower paychecks than expected, or requiring more re-education because of gaps in employment caused by family obligations and unemployment. 
All in all, women (and men) who are smart enough to be a computer science are smart enough to see that computer science may not be a good career choice for anyone who wants a life that involves a family, or even a life. The high tech community is not family friendly and very unforgiving of those who have a family or are not driven to "own their job". This is an industry wide problem that is devoid of childcare facilities and increasingly less health care the further one gets away from the top companies. As more competition from overseas comes into play, wages and benefits will decrease, thus making a computer science career choice for women even more unattractive. Other, non-computer science professions are more forgiving of people taking sabbaticals and smart women are more likely to seek those choices. What needs to be done to attract more women into computer science is to improve equal pay, flexible work hours, childcare, career re-entry, re-education, maternal leave, and health benefits in all high tech companies. This would reassure women that computer science is a valid career choice and not just a horse race.Septagram (talk) 04:08, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Correction of my own statement "before the high school" should be "before bachelorship at least" http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00037/abstract  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:808:201:100:99F7:6A1B:C66C:7C6B (talk) 11:02, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternative Reasons for Lack of Women in Computer Science  

message: I have my doubts about the 'co-inventor' claim-- in an interview she gave (citation needed..), she disavowed any real involvement with the invention/patent, and it done as more of a courtesy.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.14.156.195 (talk) 03:02, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Reference: Locate the IEEE Spectrum article about her from the 1980s. 99.11.227.190 (talk) 19:04, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hedy Lamarr 

message: I propose that Women, girls and information technology and Women in the Information Age should be merged here. The first is an essay-like article that is essentially a content fork (computing=information technology) and the second is a non-notable research project. Fences&Windows 19:34, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I see the first merge was proposed in 2006. I think four years and no improvement shows that article is not viable as a separate topic. Fences&Windows 19:37, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

text: I don't think Women in the Information Age is even worth merging. There's really no information on the subject except for its existence and who is leading it. I have proposed it for deletion. RockMagnetist (talk) 17:06, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Merges

message: It's an article which focuses on the lack of women in computing. The Overview, Attracting women into computer science, Gender theory and women in computing, and  International perspective all ride a serious bummer which should live on another page. I went to this page to read about women in computing. Not why women are not in computing to the same proportion as men. 
See the stereotype threat effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
Can I get a witness? Can someone help fix this?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rcmulcrone (talk • contribs) 19:09, 3 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I second this request. All that whining needs to be removed from the article. It makes for a very unpleasant and distracting read. There is already an article on sexism in the technology industry. --IO Device (talk) 16:55, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed split of article 

message: "Global concerns" is vague. Is there a specific desire (on whose part, then?) to increase the percentage of women in computing? It's 20% in the USA. And if that is to be the main focus of the article, maybe it should be labeled differetly, e.g., strategies for reducing the gender gap. I don't care if 90% of the article is about this, as long as it's labeled properly. 
Also, if Lovelace is going to be used as an illustration, bear in mind that her notes about an algorithm that could have been programmed on Babbage's machine are controversial. Some people say that your instructions are a computer program, whether or not you ever ran it on a machine; others insist that a plan for a program, however detailed and useful, remains a plan until translated into a specific computer language. Until then, it's an idea for a program, possible a wonderful idea ... but not a program. This might, paradoxically, discourage high school girls from becoming programmers because she only wrote about it and never got to do it. Grace Hopper might be a better role model. But we must be careful not to ***do*** advocacy here; rather, we ***report*** on other people's advocacy.
Anyway, I changed "misconceptions" to concepts. Much of computing, in the software development industry, actually does involve sitting in front of a computer writing code. Not all day, of course, but it is the central aspect of the job. It may be that women aren't as willing as men to do this. Now if we'd like to write about the other aspects of computing, such as discussing ideas with others, that's fine. But I didn't see anything in the cited New York Times article to show that the "lone programmer in a cubicle" image is a is a misconception. Joel Sposky and Steve McConnell both recommend private offices for programmers, where he (or she) can work undisturbed for long stretches of time. --Uncle Ed (talk) 12:30, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Some problems with the article

message: 1/ Some of the dates on the time line are wrong, off by a decade is some cases.
2/ Major gaps: people, topics, relation to world events are missing.
3/ Too much historical emphasis on the recent. Some of the women's roles were more managerial and economic (e.g., Meg) rather than technical. If you are comparing with Bill Gates: are you jealous, simply because he is a billionaire or because of his early technical skill writing a BASIC interpreter which made him a billionaire?
4/ Reference material in general is 21st century.
5/ Watch more for honors, titles and award for older folk, but be mindful of the young. 99.11.227.190 (talk) 19:12, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The page (and wikipedia in general) has series problems 

message: The section "Organizations for women in computing" is becoming a bit of a spam magnet. Stricter inclusion criteria would help to deal with this. I suggest limiting the list to notable organisations only – ie. those that have their own WP article. DoctorKubla (talk) 08:58, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, since no-one objects, I'll go ahead and trim the list of non-notable entries. DoctorKubla (talk) 07:16, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spam 

message: The timeline of women in computing is suffering from a bit of an identity crisis – it's trying to be both a "timeline of women in computing" and a "list of famous women in computing" at the same time. Which results in a bit of a mess, because the two are not synonymous. A timeline is usually understood to be a list of significant, landmark events, but not every notable woman in computing was involved in such an event. Entries like "Phyllis Fox worked on the PORT portable mathematical/numerical library" or "Sally Floyd (~1953–), is most renowned for her work on Transmission Control Protocol" just don't belong in a timeline; they would, however, belong in a list of notable women. We need to decide which type of list we want this to be.
In the meantime, I'm going to remove the following entries, where neither the event nor the people involved appear to be significant:
*1970?: Susan Nycum did early computer security and computer law/intellectual property for Datamation.
*1978: The Association for Women in Computing was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1978.
*1986: Hannah Smith was the "Girlie tipster" for CRASH (magazine).
*2008: Elektra, a member of the Chaos Computer Club developped Mesh Potato, a device for providing low-cost telephony and  Internet in areas where alternative access either doesn’t exist or is  too expensive.
If anyone objects to this, feel free to revert me and we can discuss it. But I'm mainly hoping to encourage discussion of my broader question: should this list be a timeline of events, or simply a list of famous women?  DoctorKubla (talk) 08:22, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timeline, or list of famous women? 

message: Even as they discuss discrimination and bias against women, they often themselves read like they're written by gender biased ideologues. There seems to be a gynocentric focus on women at this encyclopedia. What about African Americans in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (or computing, or whatever) or hispanics, or any other racial or ethnic minority groups for that matter? Are they not considered as important of a topic for an encyclopedia? I'm addressing here a potential favouritism shown towards women as an historically disadvantaged group that I think needs some attention at this encyclopedia. It's as important for an encyclopedia not to  show favourtism towards a certain group as it is for an encyclopedia not to be biased. I would appreciate any comments about this.
(It's no one's fault that the vast majority of the editors and writers here are men, but I am wondering if there exists a possible, and completely needless, "guilt trip" on the part of many male editors here as the cause for this favouritism towards articles on women; I only bring this up because surely there has to be some explanation, pyschological or otherwise, as to why there is so much attention given here at Wikipedia to only women in almost every aspect of life and yet so little given to any other groups of people. Just a possible psychological explanation for this obvious discrepancy.) Alialiac (talk) 11:46, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: This even has it's own category now: :Category:Women_in_computing, but it's nothing compared to this expansive women+biology tree I found recently: :Category:Women_biologists.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:29, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  These "Women in..." articles may reveal, ironically, favouritism and bias themselves. 

message: I believe this page is still having an identity crisis. Is it a page about how women are underrepresented or is it a page about the history of women in computing? Judging from the title I would say the history of women in computing but judging from the content I would say it is an article about how women are underrepresented with a foot note about the history. Reading through the table of contents and looking back at the title of the article I was confused. I am doing research for a school assignment. I believe that if I was looking into why there are so few women in Computer Science this article may help. However I agree with the earlier comment on how “Decline of Women in CS” has decreased proportionately with the number of men in the profession. I believe this article draws too much attention to the fact that the number of women in the Computer Science field has recently decreased and does not draw enough attention to the fact that at the same time the number of males in the field has proportionately decreased as well. I believe that the information in this article is important but I think that the title and the content do not match. The title suggests a general understanding of the topic but the table of contents communicates that the article is all about how women are underrepresented in the field and progressively becoming more of a minority. Please give me feedback the whole reason I am writing this is to try to expand my understanding of the issue. Colinqb (talk) 18:02, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Assignment 

message: Lots of this article is "gender theory" speculation not backed by soild research.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.114.88.111 (talk) 15:02, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Such as? You may well be right – I haven't read this article closely – but broad statements are hard to act upon. Can you give some examples of information in the article that isn't backed up by reliable sources, or that puts forward a non-neutral POV? DoctorKubla (talk) 18:22, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: There are two things wrong with this section heading in the article. Firstly, it suggests that English Wikipedia is only read or written by Americans, neither of which is true. Secondly, it suggests that Native Americans are not Americans, but live in some other country entirely!--greenrd (talk) 14:58, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Since no-one replied or did anything about this for several months, I have now "fixed" the issue myself.--greenrd (talk) 09:46, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  "International perspective" 

message: I just removed a couple of paragraphs that were added by User:Abickel in February 2014. Some of this content was taken from page 917 of the Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology, and I thought it was a fair assumption that the rest was copied from somewhere too (especially given the word-for-word repetition of the same sentence in both paragraphs). Looking through the revision history, I noticed that quite a lot of content has been added by users (like Abickel) with few or no other edits outside of this article – if anyone has the time and the inclination, its probably worth checking this article thoroughly for further copyright violations. DoctorKubla (talk) 11:05, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of copyvio 

message: Here is a quote from the page "The same effect is seen in higher education; for instance, only 4% of female college freshmen expressed intention to major in computer science in the US." However the page does not give a comparable male interest rank, making the statistic seem meaningless to me. Can anyone find a comparable statistic for males to put in?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Champfish (talk • contribs) 15:47, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meaningless statistics? 

message: I removed the one-paragraph subsection "Genetics" under "Factors contributing to lack of female participation": 
Nothing here suggests that the cited author has proposed his hypothesis as an explanation for the gender imbalance in computing. The implied connection seems to be the editor's original synthesis based on elements of the cited source. --Allen (talk) 20:17, 10 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  removal of genetics subsection 

message: This article shows a strong feminist bias, particularly in the section on why there are less women in computing. It lists only feminist theories for why that's the case, never acknowledging theories and arguments that use gender differences to explain the disparity.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheDracologist (talk • contribs) 00:19, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Strongly biased 

message: Have an article about gender disparity in computing and let this be a page with the names and achievements of notable women in computing.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheDracologist (talk • contribs) 19:44, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Do I understand the proposal correctly, that most of this article would go to the new article  on gender disparity in computing and the history, timeline and the Turing award recipients sections would remain here?  --Boson (talk) 23:45, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, that is my suggestion. TheDracologist (talk) 06:23, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

text: How long should we wait for further discussion before going ahead with this? I'm new to Wikipedia, so I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. TheDracologist (talk) 20:36, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  This split looks fairly uncontroversial to me and is reasonably easy to reverse, but there is no urgency, and anything related to an -ism is potentially controversial; so I would wait 7 days from when you tagged the article, if nobody else chimes in. The idea is to give anyone that might want to object a reasonable opportunity to do so, so I would normally wait longer in the holiday season, for instance. For actions with more potential for controversy, I might wait 4 weeks, but I don't think there are any bright-line rules. --Boson (talk) 21:32, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Split the part about gender gap in computing to its own article 

message: there should be more details of how women become involved with computing and their struggles to success.(Truyen kim nguyen (talk) 20:42, 15 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  evaluation of article 

message: In what sense is Aminata Sana Congo a pioneer in computing?
The article itself has no mention of her contributions and her own article is lacking in this respect as well.
I understand wanting to include an African woman for the sake of diversity,
but I don't see how she is a pioneer; what exactly did she contribute to the field of computing?
80.236.241.234 (talk) 14:32, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aminata Sana Congo as a pioneer in computing 

message: * Please add information about Frances Allen to the timeline:
* Frances Allen, a computing pioneer from the 1950s through the 1990s, is listed only as a recipient of the Turing award. The fact of her receiving this award speaks to her notability and contribution. :
* As source material, one can use her biographical page: Frances Allen:
Philhower (talk) 19:27, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I have declined this edit request. Information added to Wikipedia requires a reliable source that can verify the information. If you would still like to add this information to the article, please submit a new request and include a source. Thanks. Z1720 (talk) 20:52, 14 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Frances Allen 

message: Add three sentences about Fran Allen before:
> Christine Darden began working for NASA's computing pool in 1967
Here are the sentences: In 1966, Frances "Fran" Elizabeth Allen who was developing programming language compilers at IBM Research, published a paper entitled "Program Optimization,". It laid the conceptual basis for systematic analysis and transformation of computer programs. This paper introduced the use of graph-theoretic structures to encode program content in order to automatically and efficiently derive relationships and identify opportunities for optimization.
Link: "Frances "Fran" Elizabeth Allen" to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Allen
Reference: https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/allen_1012327.cfm 
Flyingbarron (talk) 12:40, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Done  Chrisfilip (talk) 04:12, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please add information about Frances Allen to the timeline: 

message: I see that this edit has been reversed. I'm not sure why? The edit wasn't mine and other than the user evading an editing block, I'm not sure why this particular edit was withdrawn, as Mary, if she was the world's first female commercial programmer as the citations suggest, seems significant enough to be on this page. Any ideas? Pluke (talk) 21:43, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Try reading the edit summary - it was reversed because it was added by a block-evading user. It also had too many citations including a YouTube video. Surely it can be done better! One good citation should be sufficient. Skyerise (talk) 21:52, 30 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'll re-add the edit and see what happens... Pluke (talk) 10:12, 31 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mary Coombs 

message: There was just a minor edit skirmish of the paragraph in the article about trans women in computing. It was deleted, then restored, with no meaningful Edit summaries from either party. But this does need addressing. Right now, the sources don't support the claim that "There is a common notion that trans women are disproportionately involved with computing." They mention a few trans women, but nothing about a "common notion". Then the text clumsily says "Famous trans women involved with computing include Lynn Conway." Singular or multiple? We need to do better. HiLo48 (talk) 00:37, 29 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trans women in computing