Women Cruncher's
10 Aug 2008 16:22:51 UTC
Topic 193841
(moderation:
Is there any statistic on how many women participate in BOINC projects? Looking at forums, nicknames, etc. I would say that a really great majority of men are doing all the work (that is, their computers do).
Ok, we can say that men are more interested in computer science, or in science in general, but I'm having a filing that in BOINC project it is in much larger extent.
Why is it so? Is it in very good correlation with a general distribution of interest of population in science? I mean, lets say that on physics universities the ratio of women/man is 1:3 (that is the case on my university), but if you pick 10000 random people from the street 100 of these people will be interested in science, 99 of them will be men.
Would this be a reasonable explanation?
Women Cruncher's
)
Careful now, the recent President of Harvard lost the job when his enemies in the faculty seized the opportunity posed by his making a speech with some content bearing on male/female differences in the sciences. (their real beef was something else, but this was considered a simple, clean way to dispose of him).
My guess is that people who chose to post are male in higher proportion than participants, but that probably you are right in suggesting that a substantial majority of hosts and of output are associated with male user names.
I faintly remember that BOINC
)
I faintly remember that BOINC had some online-questionnaire recently, not sure it asked for gender as well. I wonder where the survey results were published??
CU
Bikeman
RE: I faintly remember that
)
There was a graduate student of Oxford University who put a questionnaire on line at climateprediction.net and promised to contact me again but he did not do it so far. But we all are using software written by a woman, Dr. Maria Alessandra Papa.
Tullio
RE: I faintly remember that
)
If we are talking about the same survey, the results are here.
Excerpt: Sex
36139 Male
02449 Female
Gruß,
Gundolf
Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)
RE: RE: I faintly
)
Yes, thank you, that was the survey I had in mind!
Wow, 6% females ... feels like computer science courses again :-(
CU
Bikeman
LOL... Of course, you
)
LOL...
Of course, you can't always go by what you see for the handle a person uses. ;-)
So the thought comes to mind; If they choose to mask their gender for that, what's to keep them from doing the same on the survey?
Alinator
6% is not much, but I thought
)
6% is not much, but I thought that it was even worse.
Obviously these project, the community, are not interesting to most women in general population. Why is it so? Maybe we should ask these guys who fired President of Harvard it seems that they know something that others don't.
We're a rare breed here. But
)
We're a rare breed here. But I've never been a typical any thing, let alone a typical girl.
I feel privileged to be around some great people here. I can't even begin to say how much I've learned from the various developers and crunchers.
Kathryn :o)
Einstein@Home Moderator
RE: 6% is not much, but I
)
Historically women and men had quite different priorities in their lives. While men mostly hunted animals and fought over insanely stupid things, women usually took care of households and nurtured children.
There must be something still in our genes.
In case anybody wonders: most of BOINCing could be (rightfully IMHO) considered as fighting over stupid things and some of it as hunting animals.
Metod ...
RE: Historically women
)
Hmmm...
Well, I might argue the fighting over 'stupid stuff' didn't happen until we became civilized (which is a debatable proposition even now). ;-)
Back in the day when we were hunter/gatherers, energy was rarely wasted fighting over 'stupid stuff', since that's inherently self-defeating and typically leads to extinction.
Oh, wait a sec... Sounds like I just described the current world situation! Like the song says... "We are not men... We are Devo!". :-D
Alinator