A few days ago Stuart Reges, a CS prof at the University of Washington wrote an opinion piece at Quillette.com on "Why Women Don't Code". It's started quite the furor in the CS higher education community and garnered more than 325 comments and not all of them nice or civil. I won't even talk about the stuff that's come out on Twitter. There have been some good, well reasoned and reasonable responses. Here's a good response to Reges' article from Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Education titled Furor on Claim Women's Choices Create Gender Gap in Comp Sci
The best comment here is the first one after the article (by "Helen") that tries to be also reasonable and is also well thought out. After that first comment most of the men responding in the rest of the comments devolve into defensive drivel almost immediately...
While I think that Reges has a point about women making a choice not to pursue CS and I like his "equality" vs "equity" models, his argument is much too narrow and he doesn't consider many other contributing factors besides the intro courses and the welcoming attitude of the department that will go into those choices. But it's a good discussion to have. I also don't agree with Reges' defense of Damore (the fired and allegedly misogynistic Google engineer) since if I remember correctly, Damore's argument was that women weren't biologically capable of coding as well as men. That's just stupid and merits no defense.
These articles and the discussion they have started are worth having - as long as we can all remain civil.
