group projects

A Girl’s Name

I’m a computer science student. When I take part in group projects, I often have to contend with a guy who ignores my input. Last term some guy ignored my warning about a bug in his code. He said “trust me, the code’s fine” even when I showed him that running it with specific parameter values made it go haywire & when I explained why the code reacted in that way. He ignored me (again, the ridiculous “trust me, the code is fine” — no other explanation), and our group project was dinged for his error. This term, another guy was charged with integrating my code with his and with a third student’s. We described the code to him, gave him the location of the 2 pieces of code, and then found out he hadn’t looked at my code or incorporated any of it in the final result. Two terms ago two guys in a 3-student team exchanged contact info without bothering to answer my contact request. After I was finally allowed in the conversation & signed up for one of the coding tasks, one of them duplicated my work without looking at my code or explaining why he ignored it. My code was not included in the final product (though it was better than what was included). I’m a good programmer, + in some of these instances the work I provided came from my area of expertise (I also hold a doctorate in a quantitative field & am just perfecting myself with cs training; some of the input was algorithmic), + in most cases the male students didn’t look at my work. I believe my input was ignored because I am a woman. Though I’m used to sexism to the point that I just take it in stride, I’ve been surprised at the counter-productivity and automaticity of sexism among young male computer science students. I dread group projects because my time is so consistently wasted.