Obviously you don’t know what is hardware. Are you sure you are not studying MIS? Long ago, CS = MIS. Now the same department is split into CE, CS, Game development, MIS/ TIM, Applied Stats & Maths, etc. My wife has a degree in CS and working in MIS, the ratio there is almost 50:50 
When I knew her, I’m a hardware engineer, hardly any females in my department, so I need to linger around MIS departments to get to know females, about 80% are females.
Maybe I don’t. What is hardware to you? Electronics? Why are women so turned off by it?
Here’s Stanford CS requirement. How many courses are hardware to you?
http://csmajor.stanford.edu/Requirements.shtml
I routinely see more women in “hardcore” sciences and engineering classes than CS. For example I remember seeing a lot more women in Chemical Engineering than CS.
How many females are there in your CAD department in Intel?
How many females are there when you are studying for your Maths & CS degree/ MS?
I have been sarcastic because you say only computer keyboards are hardware which is a totally inaccurate statement. No monitor? No CPU? No mouse? No… You don’t touch those things?
My point is that there ain’t that much hardware courses in American CS curriculum. Students still need to learn how a CPU works, maybe even get to program one in assembly. But that’s about it. One course, max two.
If you think about a typical programmer, how often does he need to think that low in the stack? Heck, kids don’t even learn C and they stare at you blank when you talk in pointers. Hardware?
Those would have a hard time doing CS going forward because of the rise of IoT, and robotics, C & assembly language are rising in importance.
Top 20 most popular programming languages in 2017
C is ranked number 2. Such an old language, still rank so high.
Assembly language is ranked number 13. Shouldn’t this be very low in ranking, the high level languages are supposed to replace it.
You admit there isn’t bias in the college admissions process. So why don’t more women apply? The simplest answer is they don’t want to apply. Why the need to search for a complex answer to a really simple question?
Also, do you think the original pioneers in these fields had role models? Pioneers are the first ones there. That means they don’t have role models to follow. They made their own path.
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If you look at percentage of degrees granted to women historically, none of them stays at 50%. If percentage of graduation is a proof of discrimination, we have a huge problem in discrimination both towards men and women.
This is not to say there isn’t discrimination altogether. But having a policy to mandate a 50% split between men and women doesn’t seem to solve the real problem, if we don’t really understand why there is imbalance. It is good if somebody can fund the research to find the cause, whatever it may be. But under the current atmosphere, I feel it is very unlikely such research is funded or carried out without the fear of getting an unpopular conclusion.
John,
What is meant by engineering in that chart? Rising enrollment?
There is an obvious shift in technology from mainframe/ dumb terminal/ transaction processing system to fat client now cloud computing since 1980s, and the women just don’t like it. I am not interested in finding out whether it is biological or cultural but my layman’s view is women don’t like hardware. That is to say, the current lesser representation of women in tech is due to the change in the nature of the job: Occam’s razor.
The source of the article is http://www.randalolson.com/2014/06/14/percentage-of-bachelors-degrees-conferred-to-women-by-major-1970-2012/. I assume engineering includes most of the majors with “engineering” in it: EE, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering etc. I could be wrong though.
So Bezos set up a little website called Amazon.com and at first customers didn’t come. Your advice to him would be: the simplest answer is that they don’t like to visit. Case closed?
It’s an important issue to society. Much more important than any one private company. If companies are spending billions of dollars collectively optimizing their websites to increase customers, why not spend some effort increasing women participation in tech?
Quesiton: is there a gender bias in software companies? If there is, is it against men or women?
Answer: there is a gender bias at FB, and it’s against men. Women is 18% of CS major grads but 27% of the new engineers. If you give some group a priority, they maybe over represented by artificial selection bias
We should focus on facts, not ideological imaginations
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Why do people only care about the under representation in a specific subset of tech? I sited multiple other areas where women are under represented (even more so than in tech). You don’t see anyone trying to find out why there aren’t more women plumbers. No one even cares. Where’s the outrage over structural and civil engineering being male dominated? No one cares, since those are 2 of the lowest paying engineering majors. People only care that tech jobs at the most prestigious and highest paying companies are unequal.
Why is it an important issue to society? Do you want force women into jobs that don’t interest them just because they are prestigious and high paying?
People need to have equal opportunity. If we start trying to social engineer equal outcomes, then that’ll be detrimental in the long run.
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18% of female CS major and 50% goal for software engineers? That goal itself does not even make sense for the company.
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Exactly. If FB, Google, Apple, and a few big players all get to 50% female engineers, then there’ll be no female engineers left for other companies. Then other companies won’t be competitive due to the lack of diversity. They’ll all fail and go out of business.
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Well, FB is already in an enviable advantage of 50% women engineer premium comparing with CS grads. There is for certain that some other companies will lose competitiveness due to lack of gender diversity.
I heard that female candidates have a better chance to get a software engineer job. Is it prevalent or isolated?
Exactly.
LOL. I really don’t think not having gender (or race) diversity is going to make or break the software industry. Come on, if I understand correctly this field merits people who have brains, not how they look.
So, if the best and brightest programmers in the world happens to be black lesbians, then would I have no problem with Silicon Valley being overrun by a bunch of black lesbians…
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Exactly.
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FB has a women engineer over-representation by 50%. Jane has never encountered gender discrimination.
Then why are we even discussing this topic?
Oh, that Google male engineer felt gender discrimination against men?
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Yes, he complained about men being unfairly discriminated against because they lack the outreach and support programs accessible by women and people of color.
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