Hey, big news: For the first time, women outnumber men in a UC Berkeley Computer Science course. Could this be a new trend?
Stats are a little wavering and it's unclear. Mike Cassidy at Mercury News says that after Harvey Mudd College began emphasizing coding instead of siloing it, and started paying for freshman women to attend the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, "the percentage of female computer science majors at Harvey Mudd increased from about 10 percent before the initiatives to 43 percent today."
Cassidy also thinks that the number of women in the computer science field is getting worse. He said, "in 1984, more than 37 percent of computer science bachelor's degrees in the US were awarded to women. By 1995, the figure had dropped to about 28.5 percent. The latest U.S. Department of Education figures from 2011 put the number at 17.6 percent."
From my perspective, it seems to be improving overall. Folks, there are more female computer science grads at Stanford than ever before, women are outnumbering men for the first time ever at a UC Berkeley Computer Science course, and the number of Harvard sophomore women who are declaring their major as Computer Science has increased over the years. It seems to me that it's the little things that are increasing, and those things really add up.
What have you noticed about women in the Computer Science field? Do you think that gender equity's on the upswing?