| > My first reaction to this experiment would be "Because they were frustrated before they had the chance to graduate with a CS degree". Well, there's more to it than that. Female participation was fairly high in the 70s, dropped precipitously through the 80s, 90s, and early 00s, and is only now kinda-sorta-maybe starting to recover. The hidden factor in there is the Personal Computer revolution. Prior to it, men and women entered college on roughly even footing w.r.t. computer exposure in their life-to-date. Once the personal computer took off, though, a big gender (and race) disparity cropped up. Boys who had their very own computer to play with in their formative pre-college years received it, on average, around the age of 14 (IIRC, I'll try to hunt the exact stats down later). Girls and minorities didn't receive a computer of their own to use until much later (19 as recently as the early 00s, which is, critically, after most people decide what to major in). Intro CS classes turned into highly intimidating environments where the males had significant computer experience and may well have spent several years programming already; girls were at a significant disadvantage and enrolment fell off fast as they switched to majors where they weren't starting off at a several year disadvantage versus their peers. |
When I started my first year of CS at uni, I had almost no experience programming and I definitely felt intimidated by the (many) fellow students who already had 5+ years of experience.
During one of my first labs, I was told to write a toString method for a Java class. I could not understand why the signature had to say "String" twice. A TA spent half an hour trying to explain it to me and eventually gave up in desperation.