Actual sexism

I recently received an email for fundraising from a friend's child's school. It includes a link to a web site that's selling magazines. The usual deal is that the school gets some cut of the subscription price and the kids get crappy "prizes" from Oriental Trading. So, I clicked on the "Children" section link and was almost immediately struck by two magazines offered:

• Boys' Life, with a cover on future manned missions to Mars, and
• Discovery Girls, with a cover touting stories like, "Jealousy ruined my friendship" and "Mix & match fashion".

Is it any wonder that so few girls make it through middle school with their natural interest in science and mathematics intact?

Women and the computing profession

The title above links to yet another article, this time from The New York Times, on the decreasing number of women entering the profession. If you've been reading articles like this, you'll likely detect the slow evolution of the message to include more assertions that demand for graduates is much higher than is perceived. All of the hard data I've seen supports the assertion that demand for computer professionals is higher now than at the peak of the dot-com boom.

One curious item, on page two, is the note that the University of Washington, Seattle "never had a programming requirement." Perhaps what was meant was for freshman admission? Because the introductory CS sequence, 142 and 143 (and the equivalent courses for transfer students) are pretty typical intro to programming classes.

Update: Here's a link the UW Seattle CSE department's "Why Choose CSE?" web site mentioned in the article.