Becoming a computer scientist is no small feat. Many people enrolled in the University of Missouri’s computer science program struggle with their courses in one way or another, but certain students, specifically those who identify themselves as members of the program’s minority demographics, seem to have more issues than most.
In the 2021-22 academic year, 172 MU students earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science. 13% of those students were women and the remaining 87% were men. Additionally, about 70% of those computer science graduates were white. Three years later, the demographics don’t seem very different to current students.
“There’s probably like 5-10 women in these, like, 300 people classes, and they all sit together because CS is a whole lot of smelly white men,” said Alex Wexler, a white male computer science student in his junior year at MU.
Enobong Offiong, a Black student in the same program and year, has also noticed this demographic disparity.
“Looking at it from my perspective, there’s not a lot of people of color and not a lot of women in the major,” Offiong said. “So, it could be easy to feel lost in the classroom or just to feel like there’s not really people around you who are like you and who understand your differences.”
Despite the feelings demographic disparities can cause, Offiong has still found community in the program.
“I was lucky enough to have a support system around me and my major,” Offiong said. “But I don’t know about other people.”
White men make up the majority of the CS program. As a result, some students who are in the minority, particularly women, have expressed feeling disadvantaged — so much so that one of the two women interviewed for this article opted to stay anonymous. Per her request, she will be referred to as Student B. Sophia Martin, a junior in CS, shared her experiences as well.
The structure of the CS program also contributes to the worries students may have about speaking out. Due to the way professors are assigned to classes, it’s likely that students will have the same professor more than once.
“With the rotating professors, if you had, like, a personal experience with somebody, you could have them again,” Student B said. “So then, you don’t want to speak out on behalf of your bad experience with one professor when you’re gonna have them again.”
Martin also considered the reactions her professors may have to this story.
“I don’t know that this will help [professors] learn,” said Martin in reference to this article’s publishing. “Part of me is scared that this is going to make things worse.”
A component of Martin and Student B’s hesitancy to speak about their experiences stems from the times they have been made to feel unsafe while participating in computer science courses.
“I’ve been followed home after my classes once freshman year and once sophomore year,” Martin said.
Student B had a similar experience.
“I think being friendly to classmates can get interpreted in the wrong way,” Student B said. “Maybe that happens in every major, I don’t know, but it’s happened to a lot of people [in computer science]. I feel like maybe because there’s more men in the major, it just makes it a little bit worse.”
These women have often found themselves feeling uncomfortable during interactions with some of their male classmates. For example, Martin cited a study group meeting that took place during her freshman year, before the first exam in CMP_SC 1050, a notoriously difficult introductory CS course. The study group was organized via a group chat of about 50 people, almost exclusively women.
“I was under the impression that it was all women,” Martin said. “But there were these two or three guys … they really dominated the conversation. They actually stood up and were writing stuff on the board. I’ll speak for myself … but it was so clear that we were perceived as much less capable by the men … it seemed like they were just assuming they were smarter than not just me, but everyone else in the room, all the women in the room.”
Being talked down to by men in her first semester as a computer science student, when she and all her classmates had a relatively similar understanding of the content, upset Martin. As her courses progressed, she overheard her male classmates say things that reinforced similar stereotypes.
“There’s been racist jokes made, sometimes not even jokes, just racist remarks, colorist sentiments as jokes, fatphobic jokes,” Martin said. “It’s very hard to actually tell where the line is, between if it’s a joke or if they’re just being seriously incredibly misogynistic or sexist.”
On the other hand, Alon Barzilay, a white male MU computer science student in his junior year, has observed that offensive jokes and statements are not commonly shared by many computer science students.
“I don’t know anybody who is actively saying, like, ‘No, we only want white males,’” Barzilay said.
Regardless of whether there are many MU CS students who are making statements like these, the program’s demographic differences are staggering. Barzilay pointed to other factors that may be contributing to the disparity.
“I see a lot of other white men in my classes … mainly because I know that all of their parents are in tech, and I know my parents are in tech,” Barzilay said. “My mom would come home to talk about her day at work. I was always so interested in whatever she was doing, so I just kind of wanted to try it out.”
Barzilay’s experience with his family in the tech industry may speak to the power of influence. His experience suggests that people are more comfortable pursuing a major in computer science, or the broader tech industry, when they have role models in the field.
It’s also important to recognize that it was Barzilay’s mother who introduced him to the tech industry. She’s a graduate of the computer science program at Tel Aviv University in Israel. This might imply that the struggles of the women in MU’s computer science program might be due to problems specific to MU’s campus. For instance, the CS program at Carnegie Mellon University, a high-ranking engineering school, is about 50% female.
Likewise, Offiong has observed the experiences of Black computer scientists to be different elsewhere.
“A lot of programs and initiatives that’s pushing for Black and Hispanic engineers have been founded,” Offiong said. “I think there’s a lot of room to improve diversity in the workplace. So maybe, it might just be Mizzou engineering because our racial demographic is less diverse … I think that might just be it, not the tech landscape itself.”
Despite Offiong’s hypothesis, there might be a correlation between the demographic disparities at Mizzou and the precedent set by the tech landscape at large. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience. During the show, Zuckerberg shared his views on masculinity in the current workplace.
“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” he said. “It’s one thing to say we want to be kind of, like, welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that ‘masculinity is bad.’”
In recent years, there has been an increase in the level of criticism aimed at traditional and inappropriately masculine workplaces. Though many people argue that this criticism is necessary because it helps women to be safe in the corporate world, Zuckerberg thinks the workplace is losing something valuable as a result of it.
“The masculine energy I think is good … but I think corporate culture is really trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg said. “I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”
Considering that the U.S. digital workforce is still overwhelmingly composed of men, Zuckerberg’s call for an increase in masculinity seems unnecessary. As of 2023, only 31% of employees at Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon combined are female. Women are also less than a third of the AI workforce. Furthermore, female executives are 1.5 times more likely than their male counterparts to have changed jobs because they desired a workplace that was dedicated to DEI.
“I think it’s very telling that Zuckerberg equates masculinity with aggression,” Martin said.
Martin argues that the words of the world’s tech moguls have a trickle-down effect on the environment of her classrooms. She implies that some of her classmates have a desire for a masculine CS program that may be influenced by statements from people like Zuckerberg.
“I think that — maybe not that exact sentiment, but those general sentiments — are held by my classmates, ” Martin said. “Especially when my classmates look up to Zuckerberg, [they] look up to all these male tech geniuses.”
While the influence of Zuckerburg’s words can be debated, the problems faced by these women have certainly been exacerbated by the program’s lack of female professors.
“It’s been really hard as a woman in the program,” Martin said. “Especially without seeing any female professors to look up to.”
Since many of the challenges Martin faces are specific to her experience as a woman, most of the predominantly male faculty doesn’t seem to understand her plight.
“Nobody on faculty is necessarily impacted,” Martin said. “I think that because the issues that [female] students are struggling with are none that the professors have struggled with, how would they know?”
Dr. Syed Kamrul Islam, chair of MU’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, declined a request to be interviewed for this article.
Women like Martin have also been hesitant to share their concerns with professors because of the way their professors address the class.
“[There is] just a general attitude of professors who do not make anyone in the class feel supported, and they make everyone in the class feel like they’re not supposed to be there,” Martin said.
Martin claims she’s heard CS professors say things like “If you don’t understand this slide, you shouldn’t be here.”
“[That] definitely [doesn’t] make it feel like you’ll be supported if you’re talking to them one-on-one,” Martin said.
Male students have also noticed that decisions made by the CS department have made certain courses more difficult. It’s suspected by several CS students that CMP_SC 1050: Algorithm Design and Programming I functions as a “weed-out class.” Some feel like it is a course that may have been amplified in difficulty to weed out certain students from the program. Wexler thought the class was unnecessarily challenging, but he hypothesized its intended purpose.
“I felt like … ‘the material may not be the hardest thing in the world, but we’re [the CS department] gonna make it harder. Let’s see if you can take it,’” Wexler said.
Barzilay found the course’s difficulty to be unnecessary as well, but ultimately perceived it as a rewarding challenge.
“For those who can get past the weed-out classes, it kind of feels like you put a notch on your belt,” Barzilay said.
Martin noted that there had been more women in that initial 1050 course than there were in courses she took during this most recent semester.
“I don’t see them in my classes anymore … especially the people of color. It’s gone down a lot,” Martin said.
Though the amount of women in the program may have dwindled, there are resources outside of MU that can help women and other minority groups to progress in their education and future careers.
Organizations like Girls Who Code are committed to sharing statistics about female engagement in the computer science field and advocating for practices that would improve those statistics.
Offiong cited a program called ColorStack, a national group that connects tens of thousands of Black and Latino computer science students who share mentorship and job opportunities with one another.
“I wish there were things, like, that earlier in your college career that [MU] marketed to people in underrepresented groups … that’s something that you find out on your own,” Offiong said.
The existence of non-white men who are successful computer scientists elsewhere has given Martin hope that she can do the same. However, her experience in MU’s program has left her with mixed feelings.
“Seeing women succeed in the field gives me hope as an individual that this could be a career I pursue, but what has influenced me more is my experience in this department, in this program,” Martin said. “[This] experience has dissuaded me from going into the technology industry.”
Martin has taken numerous actions to initiate change from within the CS department, but her efforts have been to little or no avail.
“I tried really hard to change things without going to the media or anything, without sharing my experience with someone outside the department,” Martin said. “But not very much has changed.”
As the recently elected Vice President of DEI for the Mizzou Engineering Student Council (MESC), she has organized two EECS (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science) departmental forums in an attempt to bridge the gap between faculty and students. Departmental forums are events where students in either program can have their concerns heard by leaders in the department. However, the effects of these forums have been somewhat marginal.
“There have definitely been instances where I have definitely seen direct change in my computer science class because of professors being at the forums,” Martin said. “[However,] those [changes] are not necessarily regarding the most pressing issues.”
MU’s CS department still has a long way to go. Female and Black CS students, such as Martin, Offiong and Student B would like to see more changes made that would better aid their success in the program and subsequent careers. Each of them has a genuine interest in the field, but the process of breaking into it has proven to be challenging in ways they hadn’t expected.
Edited by Kriti Dhaduvai | [email protected]
Copy edited by Avery Copeland | [email protected]
Edited by Chase Pray | [email protected]
