nancy@murphy.ICS.UCI.EDU (Nancy Leveson) (06/14/91)
Archive-name: soc/computers/snowbird/1991-06-13 Archive: ics.uci.edu:/pub/nancy/snowbird [128.195.1.1] Original-posting-by: nancy@murphy.ICS.UCI.EDU (Nancy Leveson) Original-subject: Re: Formalism versus Experimentation Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN) For some reason that I don't understand, an early draft of my message to Risks was sent instead of the one I spent two hours polishing (sigh). You'll have to take my word that it was great :-). Here is the final paragraph that was totally missing in the version printed: I am most appalled at the implication in many of the messages that have appeared in Risks that in order to get more women into computer science, standards must be lowered. That is, they imply that the main reason why women are not participating is because they are not capable of logical and mathematical thinking and getting more women means that worse (and riskier) software will be produced. The reason for the low number of women in our field stems more from this type of prejudice than from any lesser ability. I have written about the extra barriers and difficulty that women face in becoming computer scientists. If you are interested, an article that appeared in the Newsletter of the Computing Research Association can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ics.uci.edu -- the article is in pub/nancy/snowbird (print using troff -ms). In this same directory, by the way, you will find a long (but incomplete) list of women PhD.s in Computer Science or Computer Engineering who are professors in Ph.D.-granting universities or in industrial research. -- comp.archives file verification ics.uci.edu -rw-r--r-- 1 206 wheel 31329 Sep 27 1990 /pub/nancy/snowbird found snowbird ok ics.uci.edu:/pub/nancy/snowbird