Zingaro’s review of Frieze and Quesenberry’s “Kicking Butt in Computer Science”

Carol Frieze and Jeria Quesenberry’s book on women in computing at CMU, Kicking butt in computer science, has been in my Kindle archive for several months now.  Dan Zingaro’s review in this month’s ACM Inroads is moving it up my to-read queue.

For me, the edgy title of the book promised a fiery romp through the halls of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), wherein the stories of butt-kicking women in computer science (CS) are told. Anecdotes of successful women in CS, chronicles of their rise to butt-kicking status—this is what I expected. This is not what I got. What I got was more useful—a careful academic treatise of women in CS at CMU, and a cache of food-for-thought for anyone hoping to improve the women and computer science (women-CS) fit at their schools.

The book’s thesis is simple, if contentious—a focus on gender differences does not work; a focus on culture does.

Source: ACM Inroads: Archive