From the 'Interesting If It Were True' File

As a woman and a one-time computer scientist (at least I played one on TV!), I was immediately intrigued by Randall Stross's Digital Domain column headline last week, "What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?" In fact, the headline was completely inappropriate because Stross was actually asking why fewer women were entering the field than in the past, not why women already in the field were leaving. Sadly, things didn't improve much beyond the headline because it turns out that the premise of the article is Just Not True.

Stross's primary assertion is that, in contrast to computer science (CS) where the percentage of women receiving bachelor's degrees has been dropping, women "have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys."

In fact, closer inspection of the data shows that women are just as rare in many other technical fields. According to the National Science Foundation, in 2006, women made up 20.4% of bachelor's in CS, roughly similar to physics (20.6%) and engineering (19.5%) (including only 13.0% in electrical engineering!)

In addition, the 51% across "all science and engineering fields" is boosted by the fact the National Science Foundation statistics include behavioral and social sciences, like psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, where women achieved parity several decades ago. As the recipient of an NSF graduate research fellowship in linguistics, I have nothing against the NSF including social and behavioral sciences under its domain, and as a linguistics PhD, I would love for everyone to realize that linguistics is one of the sciences. Nonetheless, it's unlikely that the general readership of the Times would realize that these 'softer' sciences are part of the comparison set for CS. In fact, the graphic in this post comes from a New York Times op-ed inspired by the Larry Summer's 'Women scientists? ha!' controversy, and not surprisingly social and behavioral sciences don't make the list because no one is losing sleep over their female-to-male ratio.

Now, I admit that the percentage of women receiving bachelor's in CS is down from its peak in 1984 of 37%. But this means the real question of interest may not be why so few women are entering now, but why did so many women enter field in the mid 1980s. Maybe examining what briefly made CS attractive to women (and men) back then and comparing it to another boom-bust field like physics, like this far more insightful 2005 article in the Boston Globe did, could yield some insights on how to boost women's participation in all these fields which are so crucial to technological advancement and economic progress, but still so lacking in women.

Unfortunately, Stross's approach was to grossly oversimplify the problem of women's underrepresentation in science and engineering by ignoring the aspects of the data that didn't fit into his "Digital Domain" theme. Leaving us hapless readers to lament Where were his editors?