[Raev]

Originally Posted by Philip Greenspun

It was fun to see a whole issue of Communications (Women in Computing, January 1995) with scarcely an article by a white male oppressor, but I got lost in the statistics, tables, and references. I teach some of the brightest women electrical engineering and computer science undergraduates in the world here at MIT and a two-minute conversation with any of them illuminates the problem more than your 162-page issue. The problem is money.

My third-best student last term said "I don't want to be an engineer. I'm going to medical school." "Laura" won't need to beg an administrator to put her "tenure decision on hold for child care" as described in the CACM issue. (This would be assuming she beats out 1000 other applicants for a university job.) She can work one emergency room shift per week and earn $60,000/year. That will leave Laura the other 6.5 days to care for children, indulge in computer science research, or travel.

In a Saab with the four Swedish girls. Manhattan 1995. One of the top women graduate students in our department (EECS) just quit to work as a management consultant. "Allison" explained "I just didn't think a PhD was worth another three years." Her advisor loved her, she had support, and she knew that she could do the work. Allison also knew that she'll make five to ten times the salary than she would have if she'd stayed in a technical field.

These women are confronting the facts that your article failed to address: Intelligent people with PhDs are working as C programmers; The average engineering career lasts seven years, pays average, and doesn't justify an MIT education that costs $120,000; anyone smart enough to make it as a computer scientist can make it with less work and risk as an MD, MBA, or JD; there has been so little progress in programming environments, systems, and computer languages in the last three decades that programmers in India and other Third World countries are perfectly capable of taking over the majority of American computer science jobs.

Your January issue asks "Why are there so few women in computing?" Maybe you should do another issue asking "Why are there so many men?"

Greenspun nailing this as far back as 1995 IMO.