Houston, we have an image problem

I was at a novelty store a few months ago, and came across a board game called "The Mad Professor Science Kit". I noted that the mad science professor looks nothing like me at all.

I've written a lot about how journalists and artists and other media people need to get the memo about what professors and scientists look like, in order to help change images in the minds of the younger generation. 

Alas, we still have a ways to go. Here is my unscientific analysis.

Method: Clip Art Google Image search, Screenshot of page 1 of results.

Term 1: professor

Results: 8% owl, 92% male, 0% female. Only one person who may be of asian or latino descent. (Note: Page 2 has a whopping two female professors - wowie! And one person of color.) 

Term 2: scientist

Results: 80% male, 20% female. No owls. One person of color. Page two has owls, and a few more women.

Term 3: engineer

Results: Of 19 humans and gendered characters (Mickey Mouse), 90% male, 10% female. No people of color.

Term 4: "computer scientist"

Results: Of the three humans, 33% are women! And it's Grace Hopper, baby! No people of color, though we do have a link to "African Americans in Science and Technology", which is nice. An a Pi symbol, cat, Connect 4, and some cool geek pride T-shirts. 

"Software engineer" and "programmer" do not yield very positive results, but I am pleased to say "computer programmer" yields several women, including a woman of color and this awesome coloring book page: 

I know it seems like a silly thing, clipart, but a heck of a lot of people use it when preparing presentations.

Any artists out there want to start a revolution? Or maybe work on an NSF proposal? I think this would be a great STEM education thing. And easy as anything to do. 

Kudos to Margo Seltzer

Margo Seltzer, fellow FCS, profesor at Harvard, and well known in the CS blogosphere, was featured in a great article in Txchnologist about women in CS. You can read the article here.

I love just about everything about the article, in particular Margo's comments on polo shirts:

Txch: The computer science community may not be able to control the way programmers are portrayed in the press, but it can at least control the image it projects. What are the big things they shouldn’t do if they want women to apply?

MS: Here’s my favorite. I was chatting with a group of university reps from a very large high-tech company. The reps were both men and women, and they were bemoaning the fact that they found it very difficult to attract women programmers. I looked at them and I said to one of the women, “Are the company shirts you’re wearing men’s polos or women’s polos?” She said, “Oh, it’s a men’s polo shirt.” I said, “Why? Why don’t you buy women’s polo shirts? They would fit better.” And she says, “Well, there aren’t very many of us and it would cost more.”

Now, this is a multi-billion-dollar corporation. I looked at them and I said, “I run a company of 25 people, and you know what? We buy men’s and women’s polo shirts. You’re sending a message that says men are the norm and women are second-class citizens, so we have to put up with what they give us.” I’m sure not many women look at the polo shirts and say, “This isn’t for me,” but I still think it sends a very strong subliminal message.

The other data point is—look at the big annual events that these companies hold for all their customers. How many of the featured speakers are women? The answer goes from zero to one, amidst twenty or thirty speakers. You see this over and over. I think it sends a message that says, “We’re a guys’ company.” There are little things that a company could do to send a message that says, “We’re gender agnostic. We actually hire both boys and girls.”

And her comments on how sexism is less of a big deal to companies than racism:

Txch: Does it behoove companies to narrow the gender gap?

MS: In the same way that we would not tolerate an environment that was blatantly racist. That would not be tolerated in any company in America. And yet we have these pockets in cultures of companies that really are very hostile towards women. People don’t seem to find that nearly as offensive.

I believe I've written about this topic before, where it's strangely acceptable to be sexist and ableist, but not racist. We really need to work on that if we have any hope of making progress.

In any case, kudos to Margo. Go read the article and check out her blog!

But wait there's more!

One thing I find really interesting is when a journal/conference/grant submission system does not restrict the "errata" an author can tack on to the end of their manuscript / proposal. Sometimes this is useful and important information, like budgets and collaboration letters, but often it is far too much information which does not help the authors.

The longer you are in academia, the more critical reading and reviewing you have to do. Not just academic service reviewing, but the work of your students, colleagues, college administrators, etc. Though our brains don't get any bigger to accomodate the additional text - it still takes a long time to critically appraise this stuff. So when I see superfluous errata, the only thing I want to write in my review is "LESS IS MORE. LESS IS MORE. LESS IS MORE"

(Well, ok, maybe just once, since three times kinda makes me a hypocrite.)

Advice to people submitting things for review

Dear Author(s): 

Generally, when editors/PC members volunteer hours of their time to read your paper, read reviews of your paper, and give you helpful comments to improve your work, you should be polite, kind, and thankful toward them. That way, if your paper is borderline, we are far more likely to cut you a break.  

If you are a big jerk, and your science is suspect, there is little hope for you.  

No-love,
FCS

I am always shocked when authors say, "I am brilliant, u r dumb" to people in a position of power over the fate of their paper / grant. As if that will really help their case.

Now, there are certainly cases where reviewers are wrong, or they ask something that's well outside of scope of a minor revision. But this is the exception, not the rule.

I am reaching the conclusion that "be a good citizen in the scientific community" classes might be beneficial during new student indoctrination. (Along with some sort of professional writing course that includes a unit entitled "'Yo Professor!' and Other Letter Writing Atrocities.")

What the hell, Dell?

Last month, Dell ran a summit in Copenhagen with over 800 attendees, including Michael Dell himself. As an MC for the event they hired Mads Christensen, who apparently is well known in Denmark for making racist, sexist, and other sorts of remarks in bad taste.

Christiane Vejlo was in the audience and tweeted and blogged about some of the comments Christensen made. He started out by noticing the majority of people in the crowd were men and said:

"The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy". 

Then he points out the very few women in the room and says, "What are you actually doing here?" 

... 

After the break Mads Christensen shares with us his whole “show” about the bitchy women who want to steal the power in politics, boards and the home. “Science” he calls it and mentions that all the great inventions come from men. “We can thank women for the rolling pin,” he adds.  And then the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say, “shut up, bitch!”.

Sigh.
The worst part is apparently Dell's response to complaints were along the lines of, "But, of course we support women! We were just trying to be funny. Ha ha. Can't you take a joke?"
I guess they realized this wasn't a good reply, so then they said something along the lines of, "We're sorry if we offended anyone." That "if" suggesting it is a woman's (or man's) fault if they were offended.

Molly Wood at CNET recently wrote about the event, and noted that apparently Dell has a precedent of being rather anti-women. In 2009 they had a marketing campaign suggesting women only used computers for dieting and shopping (you forgot knitting!), and it also settled a $10 million lawsuit over pay discrimination.
Dell, I am shaking my rolling pin at you. (Which I can do when I'm not baking your face off.)

May CACM: Women Say What?

So I was reading the May issue of Communications of the ACM* today, and came across one of those lovely field naval gazing articles, "An n-gram analysis of Communications 2000-2010", by D. Soper and O. Turel. You don't really need to know what n-grams are for this blog post, suffice to say it's a way of analyzing gobs of text to try to figure out word usage patterns.

The tagline in the magazine for this article is, "Applied to almost 3,500 articles [this article] reveals computing's (and Communications') culture, identity, and evolution." This description is pretty apt - as I said, lots of field naval gazing.

So I get to the point in the article where the authors start discussing changes in writing style in the magazine over the past 10 years, and came across this nugget:

Our n-gram analysis also revealed changes in Communications' use of gender-related terms from 2000 to 2010. On average, masculine pronouns (such as "he", "his", and "him") appeared 277% more often than feminine pronouns (such as "she", "hers", and "her"). Moreover, the gap widened from 190% in 2000 to more than 290% in 2010. One possible explanation is the gender gap between male and female computing professionals also grew and was wider in 2010 than it was at any time in the previous 25 years.

Say what?

A far more likely explanation is writing bias. In 2012, the primary staff columnists at CACM are men (10 of 13) and the primary editorial board members are men (9 of 10). How often do the staff columnists call female computer scientists for quotes in articles? How often do they profile the research of women? How often does the editorial board correct authors who use gendered language in their contributed articles?

I agree there is a gender gap in computing, but I do not believe that explains Soper and Turel's pronoun results very well.

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* For the non-Computer Scientist readers out there, Communications of the ACM (or CACM) is a monthly magazine put out by our primary professional organization. In addition to the typical society magazine stuff, it also contains peer-reviewed research articles.

How to get started with programming

I am often asked:

How can I teach my kid to program?

And:

How can I learn to program?

I'm glad you asked! I probably should have answered your questions during CS Education Week, but it appears I'm about 5 months too late for that.

For kids, two of the best resources I know of are Scratch and Alice. I also think Computational Fairy Tales and Computer Science Unplugged are excellent resources for kids.

For girls in particular, there is Dot Diva, for girls of color, Black Girls Code.

For older kids and grownups, and those with a perchant for Art and visualization, I highly recommend Processing.

For grownups, I recommend Udacity.

This should be enough to get you and your kids up and running. Have fun!