Like Mary Jane Irwin and many others, I am dissatisfied with the number of women in academic computer science. That's an understatement. I am increasingly alarmed. Over the past decade, gender-balance has steadily deteriorated at the undergraduate level in computer science in the USA. I don't like the current situation in the undergraduate classroom, and I am afraid of what it portends for gender-balance at the faculty level in the future. My motivation: I don't want to work in a gender-segregated workplace for the rest of my life.
When I first started teaching, at UC Berkeley in 1979, I saw few female students in my undergraduate classes. In a class of thirty, there'd be a handful of female faces. The gender mix, or rather the lack thereof, was even more noticeable at the graduate level. In a seminar of ten students, it was rare to see more than a couple of females. And there were very few female faculty. This was far from a gender-balanced workplace, but at least the situation seemed to be improving.
According to a statistical series on undergraduate degree conferrals collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES of the US Department of Education), the gender ratio among CS undergraduates improved from 20% to nearly 40% over the period 1975 to 1984. Since then, there has been a steady decline. According to the latest data in my possession, in the class of 1993, only 28% of the CS BS degree recipients in the USA were female. This is a national average.
At major research universities, there are even fewer women in CS undergraduate programs than suggested by the national averages discussed above. The MIT Planning Office (in response to, I believe, a request by Hal Abelson) performed a detailed analysis of the NCES data for the class of 1990. I have a hardcopy printout of this analysis. The percentage of females among the CS undergraduate degrees that year among the CRA's "top 12 schools" was 22% at Stanford, 21% at MIT, 24% at Carnegie-Mellon, 31% at UC Berkeley, 13% at Cornell, 12% at U Illinois-Urbana, 19% at U Washington, 21% at UT-Austin, 30% at UW-Madison, 19% at U South Carolina; the NCES series has no data for 1990 CS undergraduate degrees from UCLA or U Toronto. Note that only Berkeley and Madison approached the 1990 national average (30%) gender ratio for undergraduate CS degree recipients.
According to the latest Taulbee report, only 18% of the undergraduate CS degree recipients in 1994 were female. Historically, gender ratios for Master's degrees in CS are lower than those for Bachelor's degrees, and gender ratios for CS Ph.D. recipients are lower still. As we follow an age-cohort through the "pipeline" of advancement in academic CS, we see fewer and fewer females. The current year, then, is a special moment in the history of our field: the gender ratios at all degree levels are approximately equal, at about 18%.
I'd say that the downward trend in undergraduate female participation in CS will result in a downward trend in female CS Ph.D. conferrals.
You might believe that, at present, no downward trend exists in undergraduate female CS ratios. Alas, I disagree. Another wave is coming down the pipeline, judging from data collected by the College Board, 45 Columbus Avenue, New York NY 10023-6992 USA. (Dr. Nancy Griffeth of Bellcore was, I believe, the first to study this data for its relevance to the CS pipeline.)
Before high-school students take the graded portion of an SAT exam, they indicate their areas of highest interest among a list of "College Majors by Academic Area." The College Board publishes a yearly digest of their answers, broken down by gender and broad major field.
Among academic disciplines within science and engineering, computer science stands out as the only field with a downward trend in interest among high-school females. I'm particularly concerned by the sharp drop from 37% to 29%, in 1991 through 1994. I fear this 8-point drop in gender ratio among intended majors in 1991-94 portends an 8-point drop in the gender ratio among BS CS degree recipients in 1994-98. Note that the 1982-85 drop in gender ratio among intended CS majors occurred just before the 1985-88 drop in gender ratio among BS CS degree recipients.
In case you're wondering about the absolute numbers of high-school students expressing interest in computer science, I've plotted these separately for females and males. At the risk of swamping you with undigested data, I've also plotted gender ratios and absolute numbers of females and males by broad area of interest. If you want to prepare your own plots or check my calculations, you may download my Excel 5.0 worksheet or a comma-delimited text printout.
My intent, in writing this column, is to spark discussion of "why" computer science is becoming more gender-segregated, at the undergraduate level. More importantly, "what" can we do about it? I hope you are inspired to discuss these questions with your friends and colleagues, send me email, write something for publication, and/or get involved in a mentoring or outreach program.
cthombor@cs.umn.edu
Last modified: July 27, 1995
