In yet another chapter of the Damore drama, Stuart Reges, a Senior lecturer, who does the intro courses at University of Washington in Computer Science, has been given a one year contract, instead of the usual three year contract, and has been told he is being pushed out because of his old Quillette essay, where he opined that it is probably impossible to get women above 20% in CS, as they are not interested in it in general.
Needless to say, the protestors approached the faculty with demands that Reges be fired, and some other more unusual requests. Some of these were passed on to Reges:
A relaxation of grading on coding style.
Allowing students to work together in a group for part of their grade instead of requiring them to complete all graded work individually.
Training for TAs in inclusion and implicit bias.
Review of all course materials for inclusiveness. For instance, of a lecture that involves calculating body mass index (BMI) using guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, the report noted that it “seems insensitive to present students with a program that would print out that some of them are ‘obese’ while others are ‘normal.’”
A reduction in the amount of effort expended pursuing cheating cases by 50 percent even though there has been no reduction in cheating cases.
I actually find the grading changes reasonable, as women often are more sensitive to grades, and stupidly switch from difficult majors, (where they could get a job) to stupid ones, (which will always be useless to them) in order to keep their grades (which will never matter again) up.
The cheating and group work changes are very transparent. I have often heard complaints from male computer science students about how their male project mates have let them down. I have never heard a guy complain about a girl letting him down on a project, as no-one would ever imagine that on a mixed team, a girl would do any substantial coding. Girls who can code, work on all girl teams.
Cheating is rampant in Universities, but in Computer Science, there is a small effort stop this, using automated tools. This was unacceptable to a subset of the Asian students who consider cheating to be normalized. Sadly, as the Asian students are usually a majority of classes, this acceptance of cheating has spread, and is not longer something unique to international students, but has spread to native born Asian students, and white female students (to a small degree). I can't tell if white male students have started cheating more than in the past, as their numbers are low, and their grades were always quite high. Sadly, I imagine the rot has spread pretty much everywhere.
Many of the top Ivy league and equivalent colleges have dumbed down their CS courses to the point where the average student is no longer qualified to work at a major firm after they graduate. The West Coast public schools have maintained their standards, but as cheating increases, there is pressure to make courses more difficult to compensate. This creates a huge differential between CS courses, which are hard, and require a major time investment, and where low grades are normal, and non-STEM courses, where life is good. For females or minorities, this makes these non CS courses attractive, but white male students can't really switch, as they are under the impression that they are not wanted in much of the humanities, and will be given bad grades punitively. This is not true in general, as there are many honest humanities professors, but sadly, the ones who teach distribution requirements tend to be worse about this than the general run, and this is what students are most aware of.
I suppose the West coast could dumb down their curriculum, but someone has to teach people how to code. I don't see an easy fix, as International students, and especially European students can't code worth a damn either. For some reason Europe like to teach theory, which butters no toast.
It does seem that you can now not speak honestly about women in Computer Science. Reges is about a liberal as someone could be forty years ago, openly gay and pro drugs. He spent his life mentoring students, especially women, but his opinion is not welcome. If he cannot speak to the issue, I can't think of many people who can. UW is among the top few CS schools, and its undergraduate program is great, almost implausibly so for a school with fairly easy admission (45%).