It seems appropriate today to highlight the call by Wendy Hall for more females to get involved in computer science...

[quixoticgeek@social.v.st]

@ChrisMayLA6 the words you're looking for are "women and girls" *not* females. Female is an adjective and needs a noun to go with it.

But more than the grammar police side. The use of "females" like this has a dark history in medical experimentation on black slave women and the "scientist" doing it didn't want to humanise his test subjects by calling them women.

And of course it sounds like a Ferenghi from stat trek...

Female engineer. Female scientist. All fine. Females, not good.

[celeste_42bit@infosec.exchange]

@quixoticgeek @ChrisMayLA6 I absolutely second that. Nowadays "females" is also used in toxic manosphere forums, by the far right, and other misogynistic hate groups to dehumanize women.

[chrismayla6@zirk.us]

@celeste_42bit @quixoticgeek

I hear you & have edited the post accordingly, leaving 'female needs' in as I had no characters left to insert the preferred term - thanks for alerting me to this linguistic political issue, which I admit I was not aware of.... you comment(s) are appreciated.

[quixoticgeek@social.v.st]

@ChrisMayLA6 @celeste_42bit that's fine. Thank you for understanding. It's a complicated and dark history, which is unfortunately not well known.

[mkoek@mastodon.nl]

@quixoticgeek @ChrisMayLA6 ages ago, when I learned English in high school, I was taught that “female” as a noun can only be used to refer to animals

[quixoticgeek@social.v.st]

@mkoek @ChrisMayLA6 which is why it was used that way by said gynaecologist doing research in the 1800s. It's best to just always think of it as an adjective. Female cat, female engineer. Etc... let's not reinforce the decisions of unethical science.

[dave@europhiles.uk]

@ChrisMayLA6
That's nice in theory, although as others have pointed out, it's always been the case that it's a male-dominated profession. Speaking as a software engineer in my fortieth year of professional software development, it's definitely a man's world, although not in my experience a misogynistic men's club. Personally, I think it's because men's brains are in general wired differently.

The bigger problem that's already upon us is that many entry-level computing jobs are being supplanted by AI, making entry into the profession more difficult for any gender. Perhaps degree courses need to change, although the long-term viability of the current race to AI is open to question.

[otfrom@functional.cafe]

@ChrisMayLA6 and we need to destroy the structures that drive women out of computing later in their careers https://www.codio.com/blog/taking-a-closer-look-at-the-pipeline-problem

[stevel@hachyderm.io]

@ChrisMayLA6 not new. But different in different countries, for example India. What is it about the UK and US that alienates women from studying CS? Gaming culture? Societal prejudice?

The other issue is: retention. Having graduated, how many (can) get a job in software development and stay there long enough to become senior engineers?

Attached. Edinburgh University CS4 photo, 1988. Two women -lovely as they were-, but only two. And that from an era where nobody left with £50k debts to worry about.

[onepict@chaos.social]

@ChrisMayLA6 The encouragement needs to start from an early age. Little boys of my generation got Amigas and Commodore 64s and learned coding from typing in the code from magazines, fixing bugs. In some cases from the age of five.

Whereas many women had obstacles put in their way, or had never had that grounding as their parents had no idea.

Girls need that encouragement and support. But STEM education is still highly gendered.

[onepict@chaos.social]

@muminitaly @ChrisMayLA6 We had 3 women in my classes, I was the only woman who got to honours.

[mkoek@mastodon.nl]

@quixoticgeek @ChrisMayLA6 come to think of it, the Dutch word for a female animal (“vrouwtje”) is literally the pejorative of female (“little woman”) and is also sometimes used to refer to a woman in a derogatory way

[aspragg@ohai.social]

@quixoticgeek @ChrisMayLA6 It does seem like an unexpected omission that English doesn't have separate nouns for "women and girls" or "men and boys". We have "adults" for "women and men" and "children" for "girls and boys", but not that other obvious grouping.

Although... while "juvenile" is probably the best (?) adjectival form of "child", "adult" works as both noun and adjective.

[chrismayla6@zirk.us]

@dave

yes, I'd agree with your second paragraph; we're seeing this in many careers - entry level jobs are harder to get reducing & reshaping the next generation of 'experienced' employees

[chrismayla6@zirk.us]

@stevel

I also note (in a nod to spatial politics) that they were positioned on the edge of the group....

[chrismayla6@zirk.us]

@onepict

yes, agreed; the gender direction(s) come early & can be hard to resist/reshape later

[jetlagjen@gts.phillipsuk.org]

@ChrisMayLA6 if AI were more attuned to the needs of women and girls it wouldn't exist in its current form.

Everything about how generative AI has been built, trained, and forced into everything is founded on the idea that consent isn't important. Which is also fundamental to almost all the problems women and girls face in society.

[chrismayla6@zirk.us]

@jetlagjen

Completely agree; which is why I never (knowingly) go near it....

[stevel@hachyderm.io]

@ChrisMayLA6 probably because they thought the rest of us were odd.

One interesting thought, having played with and now in awe of claude code, is
1. How does having to code through AI models actually change the skills you need to write quality production code?
2. If this needs more social skills, does this mean that women have an advantage

At higher levels software dev is a social skill, even you start off in a 1:1 relationship with you and your compiler.

[shephallmassive@mastodon.online]

@stevel @ChrisMayLA6 two women in the dept of 30 when i started over 2 decades ago and about 4 now. . Interesingly women that stayed were apprentices seem to have more confidence than others. For a lot of women once they realise that there is no promotion & loneliness of isolation they leave. Also nowadays can hide the industrial toxicity of lack of diversity by opaqueness of outsourcing. Large companies can drop the risk here and operate outside of diversity expectation