{"id":3293,"date":"2014-12-02T20:03:02","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T01:03:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2014\/12\/02\/chipping-away-at-technologys-glass-ceiling\/"},"modified":"2022-11-07T17:37:42","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T22:37:42","slug":"chipping-away-at-technologys-glass-ceiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/chipping-away-at-technologys-glass-ceiling\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking tech’s glass ceiling"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s no exaggeration to say most computer science majors are men. Contrary to some misogynistic beliefs, however, it\u2019s not because they\u2019re actually better at computer science than women.<\/p>\n

But they often do think they\u2019re better\u2014than everyone. Sometimes it\u2019s delusion, but justified or not that confidence goes a surprisingly long way according to Furman computer science department chair Kevin Treu.<\/p>\n

\u201cMen tend to be very cocky and very territorial when it comes to computers. Think of boys playing video games and stuff like that. And even if they are \u2018C\u2019 students they\u2019ll believe themselves to be much better than that,\u201d he says. \u201cWomen who are very adept at logical, rational thinking have these crushing self-confidence issues. I\u2019m generalizing, but that is really a very interesting thing to note, that all these aggressive boys have chased away the girls in a sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before you go lumping Treu in with the cavemen, hear him out. It\u2019s a fact that women are hugely under-represented in the field, and he has deep familiarity with the theories why because one of his main goals is to change the situation. That\u2019s the biggest reason Haley Cottingham \u201917 and Andreea Cirstea \u201917 ended up in Phoenix in early October at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing<\/a> conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have been involved in investigating the issue, and it really is an issue, of the dearth of women in my field, in computer science, for years now in fact,\u201d Treu said.<\/p>\n

Dr. Grace Hopper<\/a> was a rear admiral in the Navy and will always be one of the most significant figures in computer science, male or female. She was a co-inventor of the Harvard Mark I<\/a> computer before leading a team that invented COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), the first user-friendly software program that is now the backbone of world business-computer programming language.<\/p>\n

And she did it by bringing something to the table that men often do not: By starting out with a belief that programs should be written in a language that was close to English rather than machine code.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a stereotype, this is actually documented by social-science research that women are far more interested in the connections, they’re interested in the bigger picture, they’re interested in not just this machine as an artifact unto itself but as a tool to bring people closer together or to help people,\u201d Treu says. \u201cI think that’s my favorite theory for why women just left . . . Computer science as a discipline failed to keep up with the way that computing evolved in the eyes of society at large.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which means?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe continue trudging down this path of teaching computer science as an end unto itself, how to program the computer and how to make it work and how to make it go faster and all those really nerdy things,\u201d he continues. \u201cAnd we completely lost sight of the fact that society was more interested in \u2018how can we use these?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But times are changing. Cottingham, a native of Charleston, S.C., and Cirstea, who is from Atlanta represent two of the 10 female computer science majors at Furman. That\u2019s still only 20 percent of the total but a far cry from a low of two just a few years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat I think is a very common mindset, that computer science is going to be sitting and staring at a computer and stubbornly refusing to give up on this problem until you\u2019ve fixed this piece of code. But what\u2019s so interesting about the field is it\u2019s so much more,\u201d Cottingham says. \u201cFor example, working with people, user experience, user interface. That\u2019s actually what I am interested in is working with the user, and sort of translating that to people in the dark room who are doing the hard engineering.”<\/p>\n

Approximately 8,000 people converged on the Phoenix Convention Center<\/a> for the three-day event, earning the Grace Hopper its title of \u201cworld\u2019s largest gathering of women technologists.\u201d Speakers included Shafi Goldwasser<\/a>, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, Maria Klawe<\/a>, a computer scientist and president of Harvey Mudd College, Satya Nadella<\/a>, CEO of Microsoft, and Arati Prabhaker<\/a>, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the career fair was \u201cjust out of this world,\u201d according to Cottingham, featuring \u201cevery company you could possibly imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Anita Borg Institute<\/a> produced the conference and offered scholarships to students, which both Cottingham and Cirstea took advantage of.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaley and I both attended workshops that taught us how to stand out from the crowd in a positive way,\u201d Cirstea said. \u201cFor me, the career fair was the most beneficial because I not only got to see what type of questions they ask but the difference between behavioral interviews and purely technical interviews or a combination of both. And I learned most of the time if you\u2019re the smartest person at the table then you\u2019re usually at the wrong table. That gives me a whole new perspective on life because I always want to be learning and I want to help people around me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cirstea became interested in computer science while taking intro to computer science with Dr. Andrea Tartaro followed by intro to programming, and she left the conference with internship offer from J.P. Morgan Company<\/a>. Both she and Cottingham acknowledged the scarcity of women in their field, and Grace Potter gave them many tips on how to manage that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI talked to a few older people who had been there before, and one of my favorite pieces of advice was to not downplay. It\u2019s something that I\u2019m prone to, and I think it\u2019s something that a lot of women in the field are prone to. \u2019It really wasn\u2019t that big of a deal, or I did this thing but I had a lot of help. I wasn\u2019t the leader.\u2019 Just go ahead and say \u2018these are my accomplishments, this is what I\u2019ve done, and I\u2019m proud of them,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cThere they are, and don\u2019t feel like you have to qualify everything you present about yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

That includes advertising your unique talents.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople who have more of a holistic approach to (computer science) ultimately can get more done. That can be a woman or a man,\u201d Cottingham said. \u201cIn general when you approach it using the skills and tools that you\u2019ve gained from all different experiences rather than just trying to solve a problem with engineering and math it ultimately produces better results.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Treu\u2019s top goals is to continue to increase female interest, which is why he\u2019ll continue to promote Grace Hopper and others like it.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaley and Andreea are examples of women who have swallowed the Kool-Aid, so to speak,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom my perspective as department chair this was a very valuable opportunity to provide to our female students. I actually offered for even more to go, but only Andreea and Haley took me up in it. But this is the kind of thing at Furman that we will find the money to make it happen if we can. That’s what Furman is about.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s no exaggeration to say most computer science majors are men. Contrary to some misogynistic beliefs, however, it\u2019s not because they\u2019re actually better at computer science than women. But they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":14017,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-alumni","category-computer-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}