The gender turing test

Abstract

In our Behavioral Cybersecurity course at Howard University in last spring (2016), students for their final exam were asked to write an opinion on the following question: “We know, in general in the US as well as at Howard, that only about 20% of Computer Science majors are female. Furthermore, of those CS students choosing to concentrate in Cybersecurity, fewer than 10% are female. Can you suggest any reason or reasons that so many fewer female computer scientists choose Cybersecurity?” In the course of reviewing the answers, it became clear that the challenge of determining the gender of the writer was a difficult problem. To that end, a sample of approximately 50 readers have analyzed the students’ texts and tried to determine the gender of the writers. The distribution of answers, to be presented in the full paper, has provided interesting options for further development of this research. In some aspects, the challenge of determining gender from a source absent of physical signals is similar to the challenge of the original Turing Test, which Turing formulated in order to present the challenge of determining whether or not machines could be said to possess intelligence.