Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women by major, 1970-2012

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/

by rhiever • 12 years ago

38 59 12 years ago

I'm not sure that that really justifies saying anything happened to CS at all.

Most majors shown there -- even the female-majority ones -- seem to show a drop-off in the share of degrees going to women from around 2000 (Agriculture, Art and Performance, Education, and Public Administration seem, visually, to be the only exceptions, and even most of them seem to show a reduction in the rate of increase.)

What may have happened is that some broader change happened that made college less attractive for women, that interacted with the distribution of women who were on the cusp of college/no-college.

But you need to look at a lot more data than the gender breakdown to get any defensible theory about causation.

Bahamut• 12 years ago

I'm not sure this is a valid concern - the past couple of decades has seen a surge in students attending college, and presumably in roughly equal proportions.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

If the surge was in roughly equal proportions, you wouldn't expect to see a decline in the share of degrees going to women in almost every reported major, with fairly weak increases in the few exceptions, unless those exceptions were by far the most common majors.

Its not an impossible explanation (there's certainly a lot more than the presented data needed to make any firm diagnosis), but its not an explanation which seems likely based on the data presented.

visualR2• 12 years ago

Whats important is that any woman who wants to do CS or Engineering is able to. Equal ratios for its own sake isn't important. If these percentages are the result of the choices of individuals Im not sure what you can to to change them.

andylei• 12 years ago

people don't make choices in vacuums.

drabbiticus5• 12 years ago

To add to andylei's comment, I've pasted my own reply from Randal Olson's follow-up article (http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/15/the-double-edged-sword...):

I agree that men and women most likely do make different career choices. Yet, choices aren't made in a vacuum.

We have a culture that reinforces ideas of innate gender roles. Little boys are told every day that they need to be tough when they get hurt, that they shouldn't be a crybaby. Little girls are told that they can't handle rough housing, that math is too hard for them. Little girls are told they should be friendly and "nice", that they should play well with others and build communities, mediate between friends. Little boys are told that they need to be responsible and be able to take care of people.

These attitudes are shifting. I am glad that they are shifting. When we tell boys and men that they have to be tough, we create a culture that makes it harder for men who are struggling with things things like depression and addiction to seek help or even admit that they have a problem to their friends. When we tell girls and women that they are weaker and less capable in certain fields, they begin to internalize those values. They begin to believe that they really aren't cut out for it, that it is too hard.

There is a lot more that can be said on this topic, and to some degree it can be debated about just how "innately" different men and women are. However, the problem is that this viewpoint considers things in the aggregate. In life, you are an individual. That means that you should be able to deviate from what "men" are like or what "women" are like just because that is the way you are. So why do we tell little girls and little boys that they should be one way? If there is a difference between men and women, then we should be able to just let that difference exist, without trying to shape people to fit into our view of what those differences might be.

In general, as humans, we like to categorize things. This has been an immensely useful skill. It underlies most of our science and most of understanding of the world. It is fundamental to computer science since it allows us to do things like DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and OO (Object-oriented). The problem is that when we see fields that are largely male dominated or largely female dominated, many people draw conclusions about what men and women are like. Relatively few stop to consider what societal pressures might have shaped the decisions of the people who enter these fields. They chalk it up to innate differences between men and women. And then they question people who don't fit into those molds that they have created in their own minds.

Think back to those male nurses and female coders that we keep talking about. They don't seem to fit into a mindset that says that men prefer to do things like code and women prefer to do things like caregiving. People express surprise and sometimes even censure because these people don't fit. If we push men out of nursing, we have an even more female-dominated nursing population. We reinforce the idea that women are caregivers. Because why else would so many nurses be women? We've created a cycle. This is why I get concerned when the fields are so disproportionate. It's not just that men and women are making different choices. It's that we have created attitudes that reinforce those choices and make it harder for people to make different choices. It makes it harder for people to succeed when they make a choice that strays from our mental guidelines.

Again, sorry for the wall of text. Have another kitten: http://imgur.com/gallery/KWDadE1

JoeAltmaier2• 12 years ago

People get to make up their own minds, never mind who created the attitude. It's patronizing to decide what someone else should choose for a career. So the solution doesn't lie in that direction.

And societal pressure comes largely from individual actions. If its wrong to overrule individual choices, then we're left with influencing folks early, perhaps with better role models.

I happen to know male nurses and female programmers. Sometimes I find myself thinking it a little odd, and take pains to show no surprise and make no remark that would reinforce my internal stereotypes.

ffn• 12 years ago

Can someone explain to me why 90% women graduating in healthcare is not considered a gender gap but 90% men graduating in compsci is?

Why isn't anyone pushing to have more men go into K-12 education, nursing, etc.? And if you're considering the argument "because men tend to be less kind than women, and more likely to be child-molesters", do you also consider the argument "because women tend to want to interact more with other humans than computers" when asked why there are fewer women than men graduating compsci?

brighteyes3• 12 years ago

For nursing, see this for example about efforts to get more men into the field

http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/men-nursing

Despite efforts from nursing schools across the nation to recruit and retain more men and minorities, the results have been fairly modest.

whyenot• 12 years ago

Why isn't anyone pushing to have more men go into K-12 education, nursing, etc.?

Did you bother to look, or did you just assume this was the case?

http://www.edutopia.org/male-teacher-shortage

http://aamn.org/choosenursing.shtml

visualR2• 12 years ago

What I think the point was there is no outrage in the blogosphere/twitterverse about the shortage of male nurses.

Fomite6• 12 years ago

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially if you can't be bothered to look.

For both teaching and nursing, there is an acute concern about the lack of men, as role models for boys in school, and in basically any healthcare profession besides "Doctor".

It should be noted however that unlike the common experience of women in CS, men in nursing frequently report that despite being a distinct minority, their opinions and ideas are often given more weight than they should be because of their gender.

brighteyes3• 12 years ago

Actually no, men in nursing are discriminated against and have it pretty hard. See for example this link:

http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/men-nursing

studies have shown that male student nurses experience additional barriers and discrimination, such as: lack of information and support from guidance counselors; lack of sufficient role models; unequal clinical opportunities and requirements; isolation; poor instruction on the appropriate use of touch; and a lack of teaching strategies appropriate to male learning needs.

See also the section headline "Why Men Do Not Pursue Nursing" which goes into more detail in the difficulties they face.

barry-cotter• 12 years ago

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially if you can't be bothered to look.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_o...

Please think of what it would mean for your argument to be true before clicking through to the above link.

DanBC• 12 years ago

Can someone explain to me why 90% women graduating in healthcare is not considered a gender gap but 90% men graduating in compsci is?

Someone mentions this every single time these threads appear. There are programmes to get men into nursing and education and other employment. There are programmes to get women into construction and etc.

A_COMPUTER• 12 years ago

As a matter of fact I have seen feminists address this frequently. A common interpretation is that Patriarchy has "feminized" professions such as teaching and nursing, because they can be seen as "caretaker"-type jobs; and consequently, have left the occupants of these jobs underappreciated and underpaid. The feminist manner of "fixing" the gender gap in these professions would be by deconstructing Patriarchal social perceptions of these fields.

tomp2• 12 years ago

I don't think this has anything to do with patriarchy, but rather with capitalism; "caretaker"-type jobs simply aren't generating enough short-term, individualised returns to make them worth a bigger paycheck; even if the society values these kinds of jobs, it values capitalism more, and capitalism puts almost no value on things that have no measurable profit.

This also explains why some people are concerned about the shortage of programers in general, and shortage of women programers in particular - programming is a high-paying job, so they feel they are supporting a just cause if they are encouraging people to learn programming. Noone feels the same about construction/garbagemen (male-dominated professions) or nursing/cleaning (female-dominated professions), so it can't be something to do with Patriarchy.

dominotw• 12 years ago

Can someone explain to me why 90% women graduating in healthcare is not considered a gender gap but 90% men graduating in compsci is?

are we doing this again. sigh.

WoodenChair• 12 years ago

From the article -

"Going back to Computer Science, we see a rather sad story unfold. The computer scientists of today find themselves in the same disposition as the computer scientists of the 1970s: Only ~15% of the CS degrees were conferred to women. Then the late 1970s and early 1980s finally looked promising: With a peak at 37% of all CS degrees in 1983, it seemed as though Computer Science might join the rest of the majors with a more even gender distribution. But 1984 saw fewer women graduating with a CS degree, and the trend has followed a downward spiral ever since. What was it about the 1970s and early 1980s that made Computer Science more welcoming to women? And what changed?"

I want the answer to this question too!

guard-of-terra2• 12 years ago

What changed? Perhaps an influx of affordable home computers that drew a huge amount of male youth to computer-related occupations.

tobinfricke2• 12 years ago

What is gender-specific about "affordable home computers"?

parennoob3• 12 years ago

"What was it about the 1970s and early 1980s that made Computer Science more welcoming to women? And what changed? I want the answer to this question too!"

A hypothesis (remember this is only a hypothesis):

What changed was that science and math became way less cooler in the (American) public perception between the 80s and the 2000s.

With the cold war and space race, scientists and engineers were supposed to be the people who took the US to the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were, after all, engineers. The last flight to the moon was in 1972. The Voyagers were launced in 1977. Scientists, astronauts, and their like were cool, for a change. No one cared about who was winning college football when people were going to the moon and exploring the Solar System. My theory is that CS / Engineering got caught along in this wave and experienced strong female enrollment

Later, in the late 90s, and early 2000s, films like American Pie and whatnot came along, and solidified the appeal of the sports-playing jock, and making fun of the "nerds". Suddenly, nerds were the weak, spotty kids who were buried in their math books, and girls did not want to be associated with them. Enter present day, with probably 10% of CS classes in good schools being composed of women (unless it's MIT etc., which preferentially admits women to even the ratios, if I remember correctly)

To see the attitude change, just think of television programs. The scientist/astronaut Major Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie (1965-70) was portrayed as a strong, positive, and socially successful character. The scientists in Big Bang Theory are portrayed as a bunch of socially inept shut-ins who are very socially/romantically unsuccessful and are supposed to be pitied by the audience.

rhiever3• 12 years ago

One plausible theory I've heard is that the early 1980s and the 1990s were a "boom" period for CS, particularly with the dot-com boom in the 1990s. CS saw huge spikes of enrollment during that period, and apparently a larger proportion of women lined up to get a CS degree during the booms.

jiggy20113• 12 years ago

Let's say we increase the % of female CS grads, what happens then? Does the number of jobs and degrees available in CS increase correspondingly? Does pay in related CS fields go down due to extra supply of labour?

If % of degrees awarded to women is increasing overall, it's worth thinking about what happens to the men if/when they get pushed out.

brighteyes3• 12 years ago

Your first paragraph raises some reasonable questions. It's worth asking those.

Your second paragraph leaps to a negative conclusion. It's far from clear what the results would be - good or bad - for people already in the industry (men and women, btw, not just men). There are reasonable reasons to think it could be good or bad, and no justification to assume the worst.

jiggy20113• 12 years ago

I think all are reasonable questions to ask, I don't draw any conclusions.

ForHackernews2• 12 years ago

If % of degrees awarded to women is increasing overall, it's worth thinking about what happens to the men if/when they get pushed out.

Those men can go find jobs in some other fields, and the average competence of CS students will increase.

I'm only being slightly facetious here: If we're going to blather on about being a meritocracy, we can't be afraid of competition, or worry about the poor men getting "pushed out".

jiggy20113• 12 years ago

The question I suppose would be which fields? It seem reasonable to assume that women will begin to dominate most fields once the boomers begin to retire. The only fields that spring to mind would be those that are more manual/trade based and these can be increasingly automated.

chongli2• 12 years ago

If we're going to blather on about being a meritocracy

Is it really a meritocracy if we afford special privileges to one group with the goal of balancing the numbers? Positive discrimination AKA affirmative action is still discrimination and all forms of discrimination besides merit undermine a meritocracy.

n09n• 12 years ago

Why do you think anyone is "blathering on about being a meritocracy"? I want whatever benefits me the most. If I'm skilled, that's a meritocracy, and if I'm not, then it's something else.

Fomite6• 12 years ago

If you increase the percentage and not the number of degrees, nothing should change.

If the number of degrees are increasing past the replacement rate of the profession, that's something the profession has to deal with regardless of the gender of those new degrees.

steanne2• 12 years ago

this does not look at all between gender disparity between students who enter a program vs. students who stick through to a degree. i suspect the incoming ratio is not quite so bad as the outgoing.

StefanKarpinski2• 12 years ago

A much more informative look at the trend in CS:

http://m.blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-comp...

Just looking at the percentage is rather misleading. Popularity of CS has undergone booms and busts. The recent drop in female percentage is actually an increase in the raw number of women choosing CS but men have been choosing the major at an even faster-growing rate.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

Thanks for providing that explanation. I know MIT and CMU, and surely other top schools, have worked hard to increase the number of women in computer science. That graph had me wondering what's up.

rhiever3• 12 years ago

Agreed, those charts do a great job of showing what's going on in CS. But it's also useful to look at percentages because college enrollment has gone up severely in the past decade, so the increase in the raw number of women in CS could merely be because there's more people in college in general. Showing the percentages communicates if women have proportionally enrolled more/less in CS.

StefanKarpinski2• 12 years ago

Absolutely – the percentage of women vs. men over time is definitely interesting, but taken by itself can be misleading. What would be informative, which none of these charts show, is the percentage of women (respectively men) choosing CS out of the total number of women (respectively men) – over time. That would factor out the growth in college attendance.

Almaviva• 12 years ago

"Even better, a majority of Biology degrees in 2012 (58%) were earned by women."

Why is it "better" that men are underrepresented in a particular discipline of science?

parennoob3• 12 years ago

I think it is because of the general "you go girl!" perception in modern American society, where most things that showcase female achievement are celebrated, no matter what their far-reaching implications are for the rest of society. This manifests itself in numerous ways, including this one.

jballanc• 12 years ago

Look further up in the article where it's mentioned that women make up 60% of the undergraduate population in general. In this case, 58% is just approaching gender parity adjusted for base-line admissions.

parennoob3• 12 years ago

(I think) this merely redirects the question to, "Why isn't it an overriding concern that men are underrepresented in the undergraduate population in general?"

rhiever3• 12 years ago

"Even better" in the sense that there is actually a STEM field that has a slightly majority of women as majors, as compared to the rest that are below a 1:1 ratio. So it helps even out the ratio for STEM fields as a whole a little bit -- but obviously not enough.

alexchamberlain• 12 years ago

Don't forget a lot of the maths, stats and physics grads will go into Software Engineering as a profession...

Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women by major, 1970-2012

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