Hacker News Reader

A much more informative look at the trend in CS:

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com