4 ms·

Interestingly, that's about the same as the percentage of women in the military. I wonder how much of that is coincidence, and how much is driven by common fac

• _delirium 16y ago
  In tech's case, the extreme imbalance is fairly recent, though. Women are currently around 18-20% of new CS degrees, but in the early 1980s, they were 35-37%. Still a minority, but 2:1 rather than 4:1.
  • lucasjung 16y ago
    That's very interesting. Is this happening because fewer women are going into CS, or because way more men than women have gone into the field? A good way to answer this would be to look at some different statistics: what percentage of women college graduates majored in CS in the early '80s vs. today, and the same comparison for men. Of course, that doesn't answer the underlying question of why more men than women choose to major in CS. CS was a relatively young discipline in the early '80s, so its share of total graduates has probably grown significantly since then. I'd be willing to bet that growth is due to both more men and more women entering the field, but disproportionately men. CS graduates back then were, in a sense, all "early adopters," so both the men and the women in the field were outside of the mainstream. It could be that men now consider CS to be mainstream, but women don't: among men, the discipline has grown as one would expect, but among women the discipline is stuck at an earlier stage. Of course, this just leads to further questions about why this disparity in adoption exists.