How One College Is Closing The Computer Science Gender Gap

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/29/178810710/How-One-College-Is-Closing-The-Tech-Gender-Gap?ft=1&f=1001&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

by cmaher • 13 years ago

9 2 13 years ago

npr.org

gwern• 13 years ago

Reality check: Harvey Mudd has 800 undergraduates total (my high school was bigger than that), implying 200 undergrads per year over all programs. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/giving-women-the-... says they graduate 20 women with CS degrees a year, and this article says women are 40% of the CS majors, implying there are 50 CS majors total or 30 male CS majors. They don't say how many there were before or how that compares with other colleges, but the NYT article says that the national average is 18.2%; to bring the Mudd percentage down to ~18% while leaving fixed the 30 males, they would have not 20 females but 7. So the entirety of their gain for each graduating class is 13 students; that's not a whole lot of students that you need to poach...

The NYT article mentions that she extracted >$25m from R. Michael Shanahan, and presumably that's paying for things like sending the girls to conferences. (Mudd tuition is $57k a year. I wonder how the guys feel about that.) This article implies that she started this program in 2005; at 13 females a year over the last 8 years, that's 104 total, which over $25m is $240k a head.

> At Mudd, about 40% of the computer science majors are women. That's far more than at any other co-ed school.

The NYT link mentions that "At Carnegie Mellon, the percentage of incoming women enrolled in the computer science program has been rising since 2008, and is at 32 percent. M.I.T.’s figure is 30 percent." Given that MIT's undergraduate body is 13x the size of HM's, their achievement is vastly more impressive.

So to summarize: this is a tiny lavishly funded program staffed with elite teachers and graced with the attention and praise of famous or notable people, with miserably small results which cannot possibly be replicated on any kind of national scale.

jorgenev• 13 years ago

HARVEY MUDD ACCEPTANCE RATES BY GENDER

MALE: 15.8%

FEMALE: 43.6%

Source: http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-545-Harvey-Mudd-C...

The Harvey Mudd story is just actually the really boring fact that if you get to pick and choose whoever you want from a large applicant pool, you can have whatever composition of whatever random demographic your hear desires.

How One College Is Closing The Computer Science Gender Gap

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