@Rivet2000 I believe there are many pieces to this large puzzle and all of these pieces are at different points in the process. So my take away from the 60 minutes piece was it was looking at one small piece.
The real question that should be asked is why do we have significantly more females interested in engineering and science vs being interested in CS? The 60 minute piece would have me believe the reason is to get more female children interested in coding at an earlier age. Perhaps there are other ‘pieces of the puzzle’ in the entire process to better explain what is really happening.
@comptechmom Interesting article, but I’m not sure it provided any more insight other than to identify multiple dimensions to consider. I really value the feedback from posters that have girls currently enrolled in CS (our D currently in high school). What are the top three issues of concern?
Specific rates of % female in STEM majors below. There is little difference in % female between engineering (22%) and CS (19%). Physics (21%) is also similar to engineering and CS. The larger difference more relates to biological (61%) and pre-med type majors, which have much higher % female than both CS and engineering. Women are over-represented in biology. Women are also well represented among med school applicants. 50% of med school applicants and 52% of matriculants were women in 2018-19.
2017 Bachelor Degrees Conferred: Total
CS – 19% women
Physics – 21% Women
Engineering – 22% Women
Earth Sciences – 39% Women
Math and Stats – 41% women
Chemistry – 49% Women
Biology – 61% women
It’s not simply a matter of more quantitative vs less quantitative, as women also have decent representation in mathematics (41%), nor is a matter of women avoiding applied STEM, as women have a higher representation in applied math than theoretical. I also don’t think it’s simply a matter of stiffer competition and selection, as med school admission is probably more competitive and selective than both CS and engineering. Instead I expect that there is not a simple answer and are a variety of contributing factors, which have been well discussed in this thread.
Expanding on my earlier post, a more comprehensive list of how CS female percentage compares to other stem feilds is below. The CS % is lower because it separates CS (17% women) from Information Science (25% women).
2017 Bachelor Degrees Conferred: STEM Fields
Computer Engineering – 11% Women
Engineering Technologies – 13% Women
Aerospace Engineering – 14% Women
Electrical Engineering – 14% Women
Mechanical Engineering – 14% Women Computer Science – 17% Women
Petroleum Engineering – 17% Women
Information Tech. – 18% Women
Physics – 20% Women
Engineering (+Eng Tech): Overall – 20% Women
Civil Engineering – 24% Women
Information Science – 25% Women
Chemical Engineering – 33% Women
Industrial Engineering – 33% Women
Geology / Earth Sciences – 38% Women
Mathematics – 42% women
Bio / Biomedical Eng – 44% Women
Statistics – 45% Women
Chemistry – 49% Women
Biochemistry – 51% Women
Environmental Science – 51% Women
Environmental Engineering – 51% Women
Cell Biology – 56% Women
Microbiology – 57% Women
Biomedical Sciences – 61% Women
Biology: General – 63% Women
Neuroscience – 63% Women
Marine Biology – 70% Women
Zoology – 71% Women
Animal Sciences – 81% Women
Health Professions (Overall) – 84% Women
Nursing – 87% Women
Nursing Science – 89% Women
Instead of tech fields, women were most likely to major in the following general fields. Nursing in particular seems to be popular. Comparing nursing and CS, they are both vocational STEM fields that likely have excellent career prospects and high starting salaries. If fewer women were in nursing, I expect some of those would be nurses would choose other STEM fields including CS instead.
2017 Bachelor Degrees Conferred: Largest Portion of Women
Health Professions: Overall – 18% of degrees, field is 84% female
Business: Overall – 16% of degrees, field is 47% female
Psychology: Overall – 8% of degrees, field is 78% female
Social Sciences: Overall – 7% of degrees, field is 50% female
Biology: Overall – 6% of degrees, field is 61% female
Communication: Overall – 6% of degrees, field is 64% female
Education: Overall – 6% of degrees, field is 81% female
Visual and Performing Arts – 5% of degrees, field is 61% female
@Data10 Very interesting. Our D (Freshman HS) is certainly supporting this trend in her desire to pursue medicine. My W and I are baffled but supportive.
Men: “Why are there so few women in CS?”
Women: “widespread misogyny and constant low level harassment”
Men: “maybe it’s because women aren’t that good at math?”
Women: “widespread misogyny and constant low level harassment!!”
Men: “maybe it’s because there aren’t enough girly things in CS, like pink computers?”
Women: “widespread misogyny and constant low level harassment!!!”
Men: “maybe they don’t like majors where competition is too tough because they’re delicate creatures?”
Women: “widespread misogyny and constant low level harassment!!!”
Men: “maybe they prefer going into ‘caring’ occupations like nursing?”
Women: WIDESPREAD MISOGYNY AND LOW LEVEL HARASSMENT!!!"
Men: “I guess we’ll never know”
Women: ~X(
@mwolf showed your post to my tech mate who suggests you edit your script to: “Some Women” because while she agrees that she has encountered “some” misogyny and minor harassment it was nothing that would stop her from pursuing what she loves.
Current senior here who has interned in software engineering roles, is becoming a SDE full-time after graduation, and has many close friends and family in the industry at various career levels.
Widespread misogyny is prominent and sexual/gender-based harassment are real issues and pervasive in software engineering. I have seen it everywhere I have worked (internships, part-time work), and have yet to come across an organization of more than 15 people where it is not a serious issue. It is also present in our classes (at Michigan, course-wide emails have been sent out about males sexually harassing females during CS office hours)… Sometimes the misogyny comes from professors themselves. I remember a professor completing shutting down and belittling a woman asking a completely valid question in one of my intro CS classes. This was a lecture hall with probably 200-300 students. Women are socialized out of CS, and that is a fact backed up by empirical research data and from what I have seen first-hand.
There is A LOT of work to be done towards realizing equity in the two industries have I had significant junior-level exposure to (finance and technology).
I guess different people just have different experiences. Good that you are entering full time as an SDE. Maybe you’ll be part of the solution. Perhaps you should also consider lodging complaints against your faculty to make it easier to the students that follow you. Michigan? Wow, would not have thought that.
@Rivet2000 It’s based on my wife’s almost 30 years in CS/engineering, as an undergrad, grad, postdoc, professional, and faculty member. She’s been active in Women in Computer Science for about 25 of those years.
As noted in the first post and title of this thread, CS used to have much better gender balance. ~40% of CS majors were women back in the mid 80s. The decrease since then has occurred in a few key periods that don’t correlate well with “widespread misogyny and constant low level harassment.” The first of these sharp decreases occurred in the late 80s which dropped the % female down to 30%. I suspect the home computer was a key factor. The 2nd sharp decrease occurred following the dot com crash in the early 2000s in which the percent female dropped from ~28% to ~20%.
While “widespread misogyny and constant low level harassment” is real (I have heard stories from female software engineers than some on here would not believe) and an important factor in the low female tech %, it doesn’t well explain these two key periods for the decrease in female CS enrollment; nor does it well explain why many countries without the tech pro culture show a similar pattern, or the pattern among younger children. I don’t think there is a single simple explanation. Instead there a variety of contributing factors.
Of course… most people will believe one well-told anecdote over all of the data in the world, whether the anecdote was representative, an outlier, or a coincidence.
@ucbalumnus Which is why advertisements with a couple of personal stories are much more effective than those that give statistics.
Regarding the two drops in women enrolling, the first was when the stereotype of a computer person as a male nerd was widely advertised. That was when all the very first “nerd” movies came out, that’s when misogyny started spreading in the tech world (there are a number of historical studies on that). With the dot com crash, and the drop in the number of jobs, who do you think are going to be fired first in a misogynistic community, and when they can only hire a few people, who do you think they will hire? If you answered "“women” on the first, and “men” on the second, you’re likely correct.
The 2000s were also the time of the rise of the internet, and the spread of misogyny on the multiple nerd boards that arose. For example, 2003 saw the launch of 4chan, which, among other things, popularized “Rule 16 of The Internet: There are NO girls on the internet”. 4chan has been a center of misogyny ever since.
So yes, the drops in women in tech in the 1980s and in the 2000s are definitely related to processes that cause, aided, and abetted misogyny in the tech world.
The Commodore 64 is the best selling computer system of all time, and was released in 1982. With the popularity of the home computer, students started coming in to college with programming experience. However, the degree of that experience was not the same among both genders. For example, one Carnegie Mellon review on the gender imbalance in the 90s reports that 40% of males at CMU placed out of intro CS through AP credits, while none of the female students placed out. Women who start out with less CS HS experience are less likely to major in CS and less likely to persist in the major. Colleges that have had success with dramatically increasing female CS % usually initiated a plan to target this specific issue in their intro CS class. The white male nerd stereotype (Revenge of the Nerds) is an important factor in why women as whole had less CS HS experience, as is the fact that nearly all computer gaming and most computer products were primarily marketed to males during this period. Misogyny is one contributing factor, but far from the only one.
The previously listed drop was in terms of % female bachelor degrees, rather than % female employees. The % females in computing employees also dropped following the dot com crash, but by not as large a degree as did the % female CS majors. Its possible that female college students assumed misogyny in hiring decisions would be a big probelm following the dot com crash, but weren’t as concerned about misogyny in hiring decisions during other periods. However, it seems like a stretch to assume misogyny in hiring as a single reason for the decline of CS degrees following the dot com crash, rather than one of many contributing factors.
For example, the first study that came up in a Google search for CS motivations was https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324884447_Gender-specific_motivation_and_expectations_toward_computer_science (female authors) . It mentions the following. If a group is more likely to drastically underestimate their CS abilities, then it seems reasonable that the group would be more sensitive to a perceived scarcity of jobs following the dot com crash, like the only hiring “best of the best” comment earlier in the thread.
In the CMU CS gender studies which occurred just before the dot com crash (one of them is at https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/sigcse97/sigcse97.html ), men and women also describe different motivations for CS. The author summarizes by saying the following. The male description makes it sound like that group would be less concerned with scarcity of jobs following the dot com crash, and the female international description explicitly mentions being more concerned with future employment than males.