On Stretch Hummers

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Our ACM-W in conjunction with Microsoft is sponsoring an outing restricted to UW women. As part of this outing, women undergraduates that sign up will be picked up in stretch Hummers, driven to the Microsoft campus to schmooze with big-wigs, and then taken out to a fancy Italian dinner. It seems a bit excessive, but it probably just points to the desperation companies like Microsoft feel in their bid to attract high-quality women candidates to computer scientists. Maybe they're even attempting to do a service to the community by attracting more women by buying their love, always the best strategy.

In related news, a female computer scientist is currently making news for winning the field's top prize - the Turing Award. Fran Allen won the Turing Award for her work in the theory and practice of operating super-computers. That's about as much detail that I have on what she did from the popular press because of the 5 articles I've read about it, all spend about 2 sentences talking about her accomplishments and about 10 paragraphs discussing how she's a woman.

This is unfortunate news coverage of the event and it does an incredible disservice to the cause of bringing more women into computer science. A woman wins the top prize in computer science and, instead of celebrating her achievement, the focus is on the fact that she's a woman. Perhaps worse, hundreds of articles are concentrating on how so few women choose to study computer science. And we wonder why so many women think that computer science is for men. Which is crazy, about as crazy as bringing a bunch of woman to Microsoft in Hummers.