Professor Meraz gave a lecture on the decline of women in the computer science field and the gendered stereotypes that have not changed. For example, she mentioned how computers are considered a boys toy, while domestic work and dolls are considered a girls toy. She even gave examples of video games and how girls and boys games are different. While males have a lot of violence and guns, and girls would have some kind of domestic work. One thing I found interesting about what Professor Meraz said is that even though females are going into the computer field, women stir towards the field of web design. Even though computer science pay a lot more. So even now that there is somewhat of an increase in the fields that many women weren't seen in, they tend to stay on the softer side of things. What stuck out to me as well is when Professor Meraz said that "women are perceived as a minority, even though they aren't one."
What I thought about while listening to Professor Meraz's lecture is how stereotyping and schemas are the things that shape our minds of certain things. For example, why do we associate men and guns and women with cooking? These are stereotypes that have been presented to us all our lives. Schemas are things that we know, they guide our behavior. So for example when females are associated with domestic work and we see this on a regular basis then we tend to believe that women should be the ones that do the domestic work. During her lecture Professor Meraz had mentioned that females tend not to change these schemas because it is just easier to work with what is already presented to her. One more thing that Professor Meraz said was about a women joining a computer engineering class but being the only female there she felt really out of place. The professor didn't know how to treat her because she was his first female student. So that brought to my mind about the reluctancy that females feel when joined field with a very low percentage of women in that field, so their comfort level is not that high. Small factors come into play when figuring out why there is still a decline of women in fields related to computers or technology.
Professor Meraz's lecture was very informative. She had a lot of stories/examples to share which made me more interested in the topic. I am one of those females that wouldn't join a class if I saw that the majority students were male. But I believe it is the little things that will make the bigger difference. If I sign up maybe more females will sign up and that could have a greater impact when it comes to future of that specific class or even the field of work.
I also watched this lecture and discussed some similar things in my blog post. I agree that the examples and stories she shared made the topic more interesting.
ReplyDeleteShafali, when you said that women sway to the web design aspect of computer science, that was one point that also stuck out to me. It's interesting because Professor Meraz does mention that web design pays a lot less than other things such as coding, etc. in computer science. I think this can be a sort of schema, in which we have our views that men are supposed to do the "hard" stuff, while women are supposed to do the "girly" and "easy" things. In your last point, I really liked that you said you wanted to make a difference, because I agree it is important to change things, and even one person can make a difference.
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