Google looking for an algorithm for keeping women

Glad to hear that Google is aware that they’re losing women, and that they’re trying to study themselves to figure out where.  I hope that they’ll be successful.

A big part of the problem is what they’re not doing and not seeing.  As one quoted former Google executive said, “I don’t think there’s a gender bias per se, but I think the c-suite at Google is going to belong to product owners, not business people. People witness it as a demotion of women. I don’t view it as that. I view it as a demotion of business.” Do the folks doing these analyses see that kind of distinction, between product owning and business? Or consider the nice example from the NYTimes piece, quoted below. If you assume that having accomplishments and bragging about accomplishments go hand-in-hand, you might not see that you can have one without the other. Clearly, Google is now seeing what happened (that women weren’t interviewed because they weren’t bragging), and that gives us hope.

Meanwhile, there is the very Google-y approach of gathering data on precisely when the company loses women, then digging deeper to figure out what is happening and to try to fix it.

The results, Mr. Bock said, have been noticeable — at least outside the senior levels of the company. One-third of Google’s 34,300 employees are women. He would not say what percentage of technical employees were women, but he said it was better than the national average of about 25 percent.

Google’s spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.

via In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women – NYTimes.com.

Where are the graduate CS Education programs?

There is a flip side to Matt’s question which is even more disappointing — the programs that exist are woefully undersubscribed.

About a week ago (although it was before Sandy and seems like a year ago), I asked one of our GAs and to compile a list of graduate programs that focus on Computer Science Education or Teaching Computer Science; programs that prepare people to teach Computer Science in K-12 schools. I’m thinking that Adelphi should offer a degree with this focus. I knew that we would be the first in the region, but I didn’t expect the options to be so limited, nationwide.

via Where are the CSE programs? | Matthew X. Curinga.