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This may be what you're looking for: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

According to that table, women's bachelor's degrees in computer science:

* were low in the 1970's, about 15% average

* were higher in the 1980's, about 35% average

* declined in the 1990's to about 25-30%

* steadily declined from 27 to 17% in the 2000's

Thank you. Perfect. Now I feel like we're in a position to have a productive debate. For example, there was a sharp decline in the rate of bachelor's degrees for women, but not master's degrees. Those remained nearly the same, then declined at the same rate as men's.

It's interesting to see the actual numbers because it clearly shows there is/was a problem. Now, how best to solve it?

One issue with quotas is that the rate of women graduates can't necessarily keep up. It seems like we could use an influx of new students (in addition to the current efforts).

There are now 60 women graduating for every 40 men who do so (in the US). There has also been huge growth in the number of overall graduates. To find absolute numbers you need to adjust your percentages by these factors.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_320.20.a...

This has been my question as well, and few people want to consider it. The best data I've been able to find on actual gender split over that period only goes through 1996 [1] - just when the dotcom bubble was getting going. However, if you look at total CS degrees (look under "The third surge" in [2]) it at least seems pretty obvious what happened. Right around 1980 the number of CS degree students exploded, with men consistently outnumbering women about 2 to 1. Then around 1985 the absolute number gap started widening rapidly and never got better.

We should definitely consider that women may have been discouraged from entering CS degree programs more than they were in the 70s, but at least in statistical terms, it seems like men just got more interested in the field for a variety of reasons and naturally came to massively outnumber the women interested in the field. Also see [3] since the new CS men had to come at the expense of other majors, and it's interesting to look at what they chose not to pursue (note: the stats are complicated by the fact that women represent an increasingly large overall percentage of college students over the same time period). Men seem to have declined as a % of graduates over the 80s-90s period most strongly in non-CS Engineering, physical sciences, and biology. This paints a really interesting picture since it's hard to argue a systemic push against women in science degrees when CS is pretty much the only one with an increasing gender imbalance issue over the same period.

[1] http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/cs181/project...

[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sc...

[3] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/supporting...

> it seems like men just got more interested in the field for a variety of reasons and naturally came to massively outnumber the women... it's hard to argue a systemic push against women in science degrees when CS is pretty much the only one with an increasing gender imbalance

This is a bad premise. What sets CS apart from most sciences, and correlates perfectly with the 80s, is that it became a professional path to vast wealth (the rise of software giants like Microsoft). This supports the article which details some of the mechanisms by which the composition of CS was engineered to shift from women to men through a series of professional and cultural obstacles, once it was clear that software would be a high-paying career.

Sorry, I don't see how that's a bad premise. Men are more drawn to career paths with prestige and high earnings than are women. That's one reason in the "variety of reasons" I said. You seem to be saying that because CS became a path to a lucrative profession, therefore women were forced out en mass via artificial obstacles. But that's assuming ill intent when there doesn't need to be any to explain the difference. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I do think that the degree to which the current gender imbalance is due to the mechanisms in the article is largely overstated.

Let's shift it around another way and do a thought experiment. Public school teachers in the US today are overwhelmingly female and also rather poorly paid. What if tomorrow all the states decided that the starting salary for new teachers would be a minimum of $100k, and you would no longer need a teaching license. Do you think we wouldn't see more men suddenly entering the profession of public school teaching and dropping the percentage of women? I certainly think we would. Does that necessarily mean that men would be actively sabotaging women to keep them out of teaching entirely?

Your thought experiment doesn't go far enough. The issue is not merely that men entered the previously female-dominated programming profession, it is that they now dominate it overwhelmingly.

Consider that if as you believe men are more motivated to seek higher-paying positions, that would actually incentivize them to throw up obstacles to female competition. If the teaching profession suddenly shifted to mostly-male upon raising salaries, it would be correct to examine if sexism was at work. If we found marketing campaigns like "are you the man to command a classroom", "aptitude" tests that discriminated against women, and male-dominated professional societies acting as gatekeepers (to use some historical examples from our industry), they could very well lead to a significant gender imbalance.

A much more plausible explanation, at least, than women magically becoming disinterested in teaching because they have an aversion to making lots of money...

I feel like we're talking about different things here. I'm saying that it's entirely plausible for one gender to come to dominate a profession simply because that profession aligns with their interests moreso than do the alternative professions available. More interest from one gender means more individuals of that gender, in absolute numbers, seeking to make themselves qualified candidates for the profession. More qualified candidates from one gender applying to open positions means statistically you're going to end up hiring more of that gender on average. The starting gender ratio has nothing to do with it if the profession is small in the beginning and expands massively in just a few decades.

Again, I'm not saying women were not discriminated against (and continue to be subject to bias), but I don't buy that this is the primary reason why we have a large gender imbalance today.

Here's another question for you - medicine and law were massively male-dominated for a very long time, and yet both of those professions are now far closer to gender parity than tech is. Are we to believe that the anti-women practices that forced women out of tech were simply never applied to these other professions to keep women out? If so, why is tech a unique industry for this?

Sexism is far from unique to the tech industry. See for example [1][2].

You note that "medicine and law were massively male-dominated for a very long time," yet confusingly you wonder whether "the anti-women practices that forced women out of tech were simply never applied to these other professions" (emphasis mine). Another possibility comes to mind: That anti-women practices were in fact applied to these professions, and some modicum of progress has been made in dismantling them, with varying degrees of success.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/26/pf/gender-pay-gap-doctors/

[2] https://www.lawcareers.net/Information/Features/06062017-Fem...

"Although junior lawyers are split roughly equally between male and female, the senior positions at law firms, barristers’ chambers and in the judiciary are still overwhelmingly dominated by one demographic – white, upper-class men"

You're kind of stacking turtles here to arrive at a conclusion. Let's assume that you're correct in that anti-women practices were in place in medicine and law, but were subsequently dismantled (which I don't agree with). Why weren't they dismantled in tech over the same period of time? You're basically arguing that sexism was everywhere, but somehow it's only still keeping women out of tech today.

Also, on your article references, you've shifted the discussion. We're talking about gender representation in professions, not income parity or senior-level representation, which have nuanced reasons for favoring one set of people over another (including bias). You need to answer the question of why women aren't even entering CS degree programs in the first place, while they enter med school and law school at close to parity with men.

> Let's assume that you're correct in that anti-women practices were in place in medicine and law, but were subsequently dismantled (which I don't agree with).

Nor do I. I just gave two citations demonstrating that sexism has not been dismantled in medicine and law. You merely repeated your implication that no sexism exists today. You also failed to explain by what mechanism these fields changed from being "massively male-dominated" (your words). Did men suddenly lose their enhanced interest in "career paths with prestige and high earnings"?

I also very explicitly referred to "high-paying careers" in my original reply, which is the only sensible way to look at sexism, since delegating the more menial, lower-paying work to women is not equal representation.

Please don't do that. I went to great lengths to explicitly say multiple times that I do not believe sexism is non-existent. I said that I do not believe sexism is the primary cause of the current gender gap in tech. You went and turned the conversation around to fit your own narrative, and now you're asking literally the exact same question I asked you, back to me? Come on. You're the one that thinks there is a massive concerted effort to keep women out of tech. It's on you to explain how tech is unique in this regard, when other professions are not nearly as affected. It's also on you to explain how sexist tactics used 30 years ago are keeping women from pursuing CS degrees today.

> I also very explicitly referred to "high-paying careers" in my original reply, which is the only sensible way to look at sexism

What??? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Here's what you're saying if we follow your logic: If male person A wants to pursue a high-paying job, and female person B wants to pursue a low-paying job, sexism is keeping person B out of a high-paying career. That's not how sexism works. You're just arguing in circles here without showing me how the hypothesis that maybe women don't want to work in tech at the same rate as men is incorrect.

https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/129386003779/relative-and-a...

Someone else also pointed out that the U.S. population has increased by about 20% since the 1980s, so although the absolute number of women CS students are about the same, that still means it's proportionally going down.

But the percentages are very important. In your example you if 1M women were coding then 100B more men started, but there are still 1M women, there isn't a decline... But there is.(Couldn't you have used more realistic numbers?) if a lot of new men entered the field, but there was not a similar increase in women, then there is a problem, why did the number of men to up, and not the numbers of women? As long as the distribution doesn't match the population, within reason, the is an issue. That is why the actual numbers don't matter, but the percentages do. Women make up roughly half the population, but less than 20% in the computer industry. Why is there such a discrepancy?