~50% of undergrads at Stanford are female. ~30% of new Stanford computer science majors are female.
What's awesome is that women are now choosing CS more than any other major, and Stanford is providing them an environment where it's cool to do so. That's incredible.
There's been a significant change (at least from my perspective) in the awareness of inequitable treatment of women in tech in the last few years, and I'd like to think that's one of the contributing factors to this change.
If true, that means that the previous levels of entry into other subjects were (in part) due to students rejection of CS. If CS loses its repulsion factor then that brings everyone's metrics back to neutral and will make other problems clearer.
Much as I hate to wheel out the trite "everything is a market" trope, the more subjects like physics will have to work to improve the treatment of women in science (although my perception is that it's not as bad as tech)... and maybe (one day) the way science is run to make it a more appealing career.
I was a physics undergrad and chose to ditch science as a career at my first opportunity. A majority of the people who stayed on to do an MSc or PhD did so only because it would buy them a well payed role at a bank, or PWC, or Anderson (sorry, "Accenture"). It's a shitty career, fighting for funding or tenure, full of victorian-era bullshit.
The sooner physics (for one) cleans house the better.
Notice the arbitary abstraction of, eg
Bio Sciences Human Biology
1955 1. History 2. Economics 3. Psychology 4. Political Science 5. Bio Sciences
1965 1. History 2. Political Science 3. English 4. Psychology 5. Economics
1975 1. Psychology 2. Bio Sciences 3. Economics 4. History 5. English
1985 1. Economics 2. Human Biology 3. Bio Sciences 4. Electrical Engr 5. English
1995 1. Bio Sciences 2. Human Biology 3. Economics 4. Psychology 5. English
and now we look at 2010 (from quora)
Biological Sciences (1.32%) but Human Biology (12.58%) Biology (5.74%)
=~20% of Standford majors in 2010 are "biology majors" in plain language usage.
Based on data on Bachelor's Degrees conferred in the 2009-2010 school year[1], the top majors are:
Human Biology (12.58%)
Economics (8.10%)
International Relations (6.20%)
Biology (5.74%)
Computer Science (4.94%)
Engineering (4.71%)
Psychology (4.54%)
Political Science (4.25%)
English (3.96%)
History (3.62%)
Management Science and Engineering (3.39%)
Mechanical Engineering (3.10%)
Science, Technology, and Society (2.30%)
Communication (2.18%)
Electrical Engineering (2.07%)
Mathematics (2.01%)
Earth Systems (1.84%)
Physics (1.84%)
Sociology (1.49%)
Biological Sciences (1.32%)*I graduated from UVA In '99 and the biggest majors by far were psychology, sociology, history and economics, possibly in that order, but definitely each having ~500 graduates (out of a class of perhaps 2800-3000). I think the entire engineering school only graduated about 300-400 people each year (at that time).
The current enrollment seems to match Stanford's stats, interestingly: http://www.seas.virginia.edu/about/facts/
What we're seeing is that female students at Stanford are less concentrated on a single major than the male ones. As a result, their top pick isn't as high as the male top pick. I'd guess that the distribution of female majors is higher entropy than the male one.
Simpson's paradox would be if there was some second confounding variable that corelated to gender which was causing these results. There might be, but I'm not seeing it.
Men do face discrimination in nursing. However, men are still paid more on average than female nurses[1]. Make of that what you will. The thing I find most striking is that before the 20th century, most nurses were men and in the early days of computing there was a much higher number of women in the field.
[1] http://medcitynews.com/2015/03/male-nurses-earn-maybe-gender...
https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/1l1k75/any_male_nu...
http://www.jacksonvilleu.com/resources/career/men-in-nursing...
There is a gender gap even within specific nursing professions but it's not nearly as extreme as that.
Only ~10% of registered nurses in the United States are men[1].
> According to the Census Bureau, men made up about 9 percent of registered nurses in 2011, roughly a three-fold increase from 1970.
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/cb13-32_men_in_...
Computing and IT started to come of age during the post WW2 boom so there would have been a lot of women with the math background to make programming and working with computers somewhat of a logical next step in ones career.
Coincidentally, these woman who had math backgrounds were also some of the fist to have their jobs automated out of existence (the woman who calculates someone's insurance premium is replaced with a box of punch cards).
Just speculating but it wouldn't be a stretch to see how when choosing between going home or switching careers the woman who didn't become the stereotypical 50s-60s housewives as their jobs were automated found new jobs writing punch cards (programming) and operating computers.
(i'm in a hurry, probably lots of grammar mistakes in that)
Correct, that was the case with a number of the roles. Those roles were sort of like the modern day CRUD development and things that (mostly) get automated away.
However, Grace Hopper[1], Betty Holberton[2], Frances Spence[3], along with around a half dozen of the original programmers of the ENIAC[4] would disagree that they were only filling a secretary like position.
In reference to my previous comment, I mostly found it surprising that these pioneers didn't lead to more women pursuing CS early on. I suppose it has more to do with the cultural trends that came after the war as you said yourself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Holberton
I suggest you reflect on this and what people say and mean when they talk about topics relating to privilege, power, gender, race, wealth, patriarchy, etc., and you'll get it, too.
Pick any subject where men are under-represented and you can find, if you look for it, groups who are (rightly) trying to fix it.
That still seems exceptionally low. Posted this upthread but in 2010 20% of the student body was in Biology (once topical sub-specialties were aggregated).
20% of ~3500 would be closer to `700, which is 3.3x the number of declared comp sci students.
Or maybe my math is wrong? I'm more interested in the actual knowledge being put in and attention being paid out than a critique of the degree naming conventions.
A proper CS degree teaches you how to think, how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities.
What separates CS from other degrees is that it does filter out those without the horsepower or fortitude on both the quant side (algorithms) and the creative side (systems, architecture).
That means, that even if the SV bubble crashes, CS majors are the best equipped to handle whatever career is hot next - any hiring manager at Goldman, McKinsey, or F500 company X will tell you the same.
Any degree that claims it teaches you how to think should ring the snake-oil alarm.
> how to solve insanely hard problems, and how to do so with a team of other smart people - often with different personalities
So how do they teach that? Or does that just mean they got a few group projects, where smart people bump into each other but don't really learn to solve problems in a team?
Unis tend to suck at teaching teamwork. Though they tend to be pretty good at teaching algorithms and systems (which are good to know, and don't go out of date too quickly).
The worst course I took in my CS department was the algorithms and data structures course. Didn't write a line of code. Wrote a ton of induction proofs. Learned a lot of esoteric algorithms that have very good big O profiles, but suck bogwater because of cache coherency when they are implemented on non-imaginary hardware, or have high constant factors that got hand-waved away. I'd sign up for that course in a hot second, if it covered the same material, but instead of scrawling on a chalkboard, it was structured around writing the same algorithms in C, segfaults and all. I don't think most CS majors could hack that kind of course, however.
Algorithms was all about searching, sorting, and heaps, and the main project was implementing several different sort algorithms in C or C++ and comparing their best / worst case performance. Also pretty easy, and very useful.
Advanced algorithms sucked balls. 100% theory and proofs, no implementation. Instructor was awful Didn't get anything useful out of it. All the other students were cheating on the homework together, since all the problems were right out of the textbook and somebody had the solutions manual. Still got an A but it was awful and I got nothing useful out of it.
The techniques I learned there are all out of date or things I could have learned in the first few months on the job. While the techniques I learned in algorithms and data structures (and other theoretical classes like discrete math and automata) are pretty much still state of the art and have proved useful time and again (and I definitely wouldn't have picked most of them up after a few months on the job).
I do wonder to what student material you've been exposed to when you claim most CS majors could not attend a basic practical programming course in C.
This is quite a strong claim. I also find the terminology "filters out" troubling. I thought universities were fundamentally there to teach people and not just sieve them. Well, personally my physics department was operated like a sieve but that simply is not a rational way to run an educational facility. It's just macho bullshit ("We're so tough...").
"That means, that even if the SV bubble crashes, CS majors are the best equipped to handle whatever career is hot next.."
I would claim when changing to a new field, any university major that requires rigorous thinking and understanding of math based systems gives that advantage.