Obituary: Pf. Mary Jean Harrold

Pf. Mary Jean Harrold of Georgia Tech passed away, a respected software engineer and advocate for increasing diversity in computing, please see a very nice story here.

A disturbing way of thinking ...

I was forwarded a somewhat disturbing article today, read it, and tried to suspend my opinion as much as I could; fortunately, the comments were refreshingly honest, and more in my corner.  Full disclosure, I am the product of 16 years of Catholic education, and never heard anything like this article before from my schools -- furthermore, it was always the case, at least for the first eight years, that the women (then girls :) in the class not only were very successful, but had they not attended college, then the world would have suffered a major loss. For example, one is a full professor at an Ivy League school, the other a (or should it be "an"?) university Dean.  And there are many more.  I feel having them in the class pushed me and all the other students.

I regret the opportunity cost of the thinking implicit in the original article. That is why we need to explicitly pursue diversity; it's not just fair, it's better.

More prose on the diversity problem in computing ...

Just a quick handoff to the article recently released, National Movement Targets Lack of Women, Minorities in Computing, that provides some data and links to demonstrate the lack of diversity, and the growing need for capable professionals.  Our work continues.

Recent note to a HS teacher

Hello -- this email from a mother (who apparently is very involved in IT) to the HS computing teacher and how the teacher's course dissuaded her daughter from programmming, it has been making the rounds today, trying to find a good spin for the story but sadly it is probably more common than we realize.

Not just in our backyard ...

Still, the situation persists, women seem to have the abilities but not the reason(s) for selecting a science career, as reported in this NY Times article -- perhaps we can resume the conversation at SIGCSE 2014.