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> People might be shocked to hear this, but not many little girls dream about becoming computer engineers. In my experience the majority of new high school gra

> People might be shocked to hear this, but not many little girls dream about becoming computer engineers. In my experience the majority of new high school grads do not choose their uni program based on a deep passion. Usually, they don't even have one or don't know what it is. I studied CS in Germany at 2 different faculties, and there was a large discrepancy between the first (~15% non-male), and the second (~35% non-male). The second faculty had a lot more female professors, I also suspect that having a more equal gender ratio benefits an even more equal gender ratio: The idea of being a small minority in your degree is just not very appealing, and the negative stereotypes on male CS students are pretty off-putting to women. These do also seem to hold true for a sad subset of the student body.

cf141q5325 5y ago
I dont think you can compare the two faculties out of context. One driver for the especially abysmal ratio in my case was there being a competing degree. A more media focused computer science degree gutting out the low level stuff. There the ratio was great, but that was due to poaching of design students. Same with a data science masters degree poaching of the mathematics department. While there has been a great example to the contrary of the Arab world (which requires more consideration), it seems that the more choice you give female students to get around some stuff the more likely they will do. That would boil down to some stuff being less attractive. So the question is do you trick/nudge/force people to do it either way?