Wednesday, May 9, 2018

How computer science effects our daily lives

Something that's starting to come to light is the lack of women in STEM fields. Yes, this is obviouslyy an important problem but a lot of people might not see how it really effects their daily lives, especially if their profession isn't in one of those fields. I think Monday's lecture serves as a great example of how it effects everyone.
Computer Science is a field that's always been dominated by men, and we see the effects of that in our daily internet use. What was really interesting and surprising to hear in the lecture was that Microsoft, a major company, tested the best in white males in face recognition. It seems as if the people creating the algorithms thought that the only people using a computer were white males, which seems crazy but is probably actually why. White males created these algorithms because they were the only ones going into those majors, and were the majority of kids going to college in the first place. It is also such a present issue in everyone's lives, but most people don't even know it's there, which is sad because it's not that difficult to learn about. The reading was just a short video and by the end of it I (mostly) understood what algorithms were about, but before this lecture and that reading I would have no clue that this was a problem or even how the problem worked. In many other STEM fields women are being encouraged to pursue a degree, but in computer science the percentage has actually gone down significantly. In 1984 37% of computer science majors were women, but today the number is just 18%. As technology advances women are becoming less involved, I think this has to do with the fact that from a young age women are subtly pushed away from computers and online things. In the lecture, she talked about how video games and computer games are directed at boys and not girls. I also feel like a lot of coding stuff is more likely to be something a boy pursues as oppose to a girl. I think we could even look at govs as an example of this, the leaders of the coding club are all boys, and I'd be interested to see if the computer science classes have a relatively equal amount of girls and boys or if one gender outweighs the other. In order to fix this problem of female representation in the computer science more women need to be encouraged to pursue it from a younger age.

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