I just got back from a very nice (if not wildly focussed) panel/round table discussion on “Women in math and science” as part of Women’s Week here at UMM. I won’t try to summarize everything here, but it’s certainly a major issue for us since the number of women in our computer science program is way down from 10 years ago. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, and maybe I’ll try to say more about that in future posts.
For the moment, however, I’ll just point out that along with all the ethical, social, and even moral reasons to be concerned by the very low proportions of underrepresented groups in many technical fields, there’s a very simple, but highly important practical reason to be concerned. In an era when we’re facing numerous serious and challenging issues, and many (if not all) of those issues have major technological components, we desparately need good people in those fields. We also need people that are significantly conversant in those fields in areas like public policy. Given that, it would seem the height of folly to not be concerned at the significant underrepresentation of fully half of the population.
In other words, it’s “All hands on deck!”, and unless you have a huge stash of really bright people I don’t know about, we can’t afford to not be agressively recruiting all across the population.
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