First Woman Turing Award Winner!
by Bijan Parsia
Hurrah! Frances E. Allen is the 2006 Turing Award winner!
(Check out the list of prior Turing award winners. You’d could do much worse than to just read their collective core papers.)
She worked on optimizing transformations in compilers, esp. for parallel hardware. Neat! I’ve read a very little bit in that general area (mostly in the context of dynamic optimization a la HotSpot) which is rather recent, so her work will be a nice entry point for me into the history and foundations of the area. Ooo, stuff to read!
I hope ACM (and the field) goes a little further and uses the occasion of finally giving the Turing Award to a woman to try to improve the recruitment of woman to computer science. The word on the current, depressing state of things (from the L.A. Times):
But computer science still is dominated by men. Fewer than one in five bachelor’s degrees in computer science were given to women in 1994, according to the Computing Research Assn. Ten years later, that figure remains about the same, at 17%.
(Weird stats given…why “fewer than one in five” then “17%”.)
I hope this paraphrase is, well, “liberal”:
The perception that computing is populated by lonely nerds in cubicles has hampered efforts to attract more women to the field, said John White, chief executive of the New York-based Assn. for Computing Machinery.
Bzzt. Sorry. There’s a huge amount of blatent sexism that is, in my experience, very discouraging and demoralizing for women in computer science at the graduate level and beyond (I have much less experience of the undergraduate level in CS and none at all of secondary school education). There’s plenty of good information out there. “Gurls don’t like nurds” just doesn’t cut it!
(Obviously, it’s a complex topic, and I don’t mean to suggest that “my monocause is better than their monocause” (I don’t mean to suggest a monocause!). Check out those links above! I have observed women in academia suffer from outright, horrid sexual harrassment. Such observations are, as one might imagine, rather vivid. Give sparse numbers to being with, it doesn’t take a lot to screw things up. (Though the numbers weren’t sparse at one point…hmmm.)
On the other hand, I’ve observed (and I hope been part of) relatively woman friendly environments in CS. The bits of the University of Manchester I’m involved in seem quite good so far. So join us! Ok, but my seeming should be reality checked by measuring: 3/11 (27%) faculty; 8/30 (27%) researcher associates; 5/32 (16%) PhD students (counts were by hand, late at night, of the IMG people page).
So, the cold facts are not cheer inducing, and I have nothing serious to counter what those those facts suggest: it’s not like I observe most people most of the time, and my observation period is only since May. I strongly suspect my “sense” of woman friendliness has a fair bit of wishful thinking in it. Not being a woman, I am not systematically likely to encounter problems. So, it could be that Manchester is pretty hostile overall. Or it could be that we don’t do enough to overcome the factors that have caused, overall, woman participation to decline. As the field ages, of course, some factors move outside the obvious direct control of university level folks. For example, imagine a sex blind admissions set of criteria which weigh AP test scores very highly. (Hey, they are objective! Right?) If women are discouraged from computer science in their pre-undergraduate years, they will not do well by these criteria.)
(Oh, and C&P has zero woman employees. Sigh. It’s not like I can blame anyone else for that!)
(Also see CS Bachelor’s degrees awarded to women in the US and be, like me, depressed. Only engineering is worse!)
To many, many more Frances E. Allen’s!
This post was updated a bit. Fixed some language, added more in the “cold facts” section.
