Hey @runesoerensen! We are going to be at the Creativity Museum in SF during the month of October, so tell him to keep his eye out and come by to play with the bots while we are there!
Yes there was a lot of attrition from the initial experiment when they started with 42% because they let too many women in who didn't know what they were getting into and then decided that CS wasn't for them. The easiest intro to computer science class was essentially all women, and I think many of them dropped out.
But the fact that 30% of the graduating class in 2004 was women vs <7% in 2000 is still pretty impressive.
Unless of course they lowered the graduating requirements, or the women graduates did significantly poorer, e.g. more Bs and Cs compared to the men (CMU does not, I assume, grade on the curve; MIT doesn't, if you're in an appropriate major you'll gets As and Bs, Ds and Fs only if you're having personal problems).
This, however, is not my impression at all, nor I gather your's.
And let's not forget the cost in depriving 16 men places in the Class of 2004 (12% of 135); unless you were one of them, acceptable in an experiment which may be ultimately successful, but....
On page 25 of the NCWIT scorecard it states that in 2009 women earned:
57% of all undergraduate degrees, 52% of all math and science degrees, 59% of the undergraduate degrees in biology, 42% of mathematics degrees, 18% of all computer and information sciences undergraduate degrees
We cross-checked 2 other sources for 2012 numbers as well.
I was really hoping to find a field CS could look to for inspiration on achieving-gender-equality done right.
Looking at citation 32 from the PDF you linked it seems to be based on IPEDS [1]. Their data, for 2010 bachelors degrees conferred:
IPEDS title | Table | Male | Female
Health professions and related sciences | 326 | 19,306 | 110,328
Biological and biomedical sciences | 314 | 35,865 | 50,535
Mathematics and statistics | 327 | 9,087 | 6,943
Physical sciences and science technologies | 328 | 13,862 | 9,517
Engineering and engineering technologies | 320 | 73,833 | 14,896
Computer and information sciences | 318 | 32,410 | 7,179
| | |
Total excluding health prof + related sci | | 165,057 | 89,070 (35% female)
Total including health prof + related sci | | 184,363 | 199,398 (52% female)
So we seem to be relying on "Health professions and related sciences" to bring the average up. I assume that's SIP code 51 but that seems like a very broad category [2] - for example it includes medicine, dentistry, nursing, yoga, dance therapy, and medical insurance coding.
I'm not sure science as a whole should be patting ourselves on the back yet. It would be nice if we could get to gender equality without lumping all medicine in with science.
Carnegie Mellon has done some amazing work that has raised female enrollment in Computer Science from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000. We're going to do a follow-up examining what they've done. In fact, one of our female engineers went to CMU!
Hey Peter, I do agree that the title missed the mark and should have had a more positive spin. We didn't mean to put the blame on girls but merely to highlight the social and cultural factors that discourage girls from pursuing computer science.
But they don't release the names of people like this. I took a journalism ethics class taught by the news manager of a local ABC affiliate, they would never run a story like this. This is beyond disgusting.
Most TV news programs are also not serious journalism organizations, unfortunately. Also worth noting that when they do checkbook journalism, they're usually quite sneak about it. For example, paying someone under the pretense of buying rights to their photographs or paying their travel expenses. That's because even they know it's wrong to pay sources/subjects outright.
