6 ms·

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

38 points by rhiever 12y ago

dragonwriter 12y 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 12y 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.
  - dragonwriter 12y 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.
visualR 12y 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 12y ago
  people don't make choices in vacuums.
- drabbiticus 12y 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-of-gender-equality/#comment-2051 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 http://imgur.com/gallery/KWDadE1
ffn 12y 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?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- brighteyes 12y ago
  For nursing, see this for example about efforts to get more men into the field http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/men-nursing 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 12y 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://www.edutopia.org/male-teacher-shortage http://aamn.org/choosenursing.shtml http://aamn.org/choosenursing.shtml
  - visualR 12y ago
    What I think the point was there is no outrage in the blogosphere/twitterverse about the shortage of male nurses.
    - gtremper 12y ago
      I think both issues are symptoms of the same underlying problem.
    - Macha 12y ago
WoodenChair 12y 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!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - brighteyes 12y ago
    The graph is potentially misleading in that there is no weight for the various majors. This can be misleading just like Simpson's Paradox ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox ). Perhaps more men entered the field while the number of women rose as well, but more slowly, for example. The graph implies visually that the majors are of equal size and have been over time, which is not the case. (but it's hard to visualize everything together of course)
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  What changed? Perhaps an influx of affordable home computers that drew a huge amount of male youth to computer-related occupations.
  - tobinfricke 12y ago
    What is gender-specific about "affordable home computers"?
    - guard-of-terra 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jiggy2011 12y 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.
- brighteyes 12y 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.
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    I think all are reasonable questions to ask, I don't draw any conclusions.
- ForHackernews 12y 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".
  - jiggy2011 12y 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.
  - chongli 12y ago
steanne 12y 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.
StefanKarpinski 12y ago
A much more informative look at the trend in CS: http://m.blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-computer-science-visual-trendline 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 12y 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.
- rhiever 12y 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.
  - StefanKarpinski 12y 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 12y 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?
- parennoob 12y 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 12y 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.
  - parennoob 12y 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?"
    - Fomite 12y ago
      To many in higher education, it is a fairly acute concern, and one they're working on figuring out the root causes of. Seriously, the underperformance of boys in school and the declining number of men, and especially minority men, in higher ed. is a pretty active area of discussion in both education and most gender studies departments.
- rhiever 12y 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 12y ago
Don't forget a lot of the maths, stats and physics grads will go into Software Engineering as a profession...

38 points by rhiever 12y 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 12y 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.
- dragonwriter 12y 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.

visualR 12y 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 12y ago
people don't make choices in vacuums.
drabbiticus 12y 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-of-gender-equality/#comment-2051 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 http://imgur.com/gallery/KWDadE1

ffn 12y 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?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
brighteyes 12y ago
For nursing, see this for example about efforts to get more men into the field http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/men-nursing 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 12y 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://www.edutopia.org/male-teacher-shortage http://aamn.org/choosenursing.shtml http://aamn.org/choosenursing.shtml
- visualR 12y ago
  What I think the point was there is no outrage in the blogosphere/twitterverse about the shortage of male nurses.
  - gtremper 12y ago
    I think both issues are symptoms of the same underlying problem.
  - Macha 12y ago

WoodenChair 12y 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!

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- brighteyes 12y ago
  The graph is potentially misleading in that there is no weight for the various majors. This can be misleading just like Simpson's Paradox ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox ). Perhaps more men entered the field while the number of women rose as well, but more slowly, for example. The graph implies visually that the majors are of equal size and have been over time, which is not the case. (but it's hard to visualize everything together of course)
guard-of-terra 12y ago
What changed? Perhaps an influx of affordable home computers that drew a huge amount of male youth to computer-related occupations.
- tobinfricke 12y ago
  What is gender-specific about "affordable home computers"?
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jiggy2011 12y 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.

brighteyes 12y 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.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  I think all are reasonable questions to ask, I don't draw any conclusions.
ForHackernews 12y 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".
- jiggy2011 12y 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.
- chongli 12y ago

steanne 12y 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.

StefanKarpinski 12y ago

A much more informative look at the trend in CS: http://m.blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-computer-science-visual-trendline 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 12y 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.
rhiever 12y 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.
- StefanKarpinski 12y 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 12y 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?

parennoob 12y 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 12y 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.
- parennoob 12y 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?"
  - Fomite 12y ago
    To many in higher education, it is a fairly acute concern, and one they're working on figuring out the root causes of. Seriously, the underperformance of boys in school and the declining number of men, and especially minority men, in higher ed. is a pretty active area of discussion in both education and most gender studies departments.
rhiever 12y 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 12y ago

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