What are the top Computer science programs for women?
Source: Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch
How would one even answer the question?
Some people did a study based on National Center for Education Statistics and Payscale. The results are here.
1) While I believe the top X school listed are pretty good for women in computing I don't believe that (say) the Yth school is better than the (Y+1)th school for some values of X and all values of Y.
2) I appreciate that they put in the work for this.
3) Overall good news and bad news:
The number of female professionals in computer science has fallen by 35% since 1990
The number of women finishing a comp sci degree has increased by 75% in the last five years.
4) Why do we care? If there are many talented people in group X who are being discouraged from going into field Y, but society needs more people in field Y then YES we should do something about that. Also, if a certain group of people is shut out then a group-think might occur.
5) What to do? Organizations like Girls who code are good. The younger they start the bettter.
6) Is there a social stigma for women to go into computer science? I think the answer is yes. How can we break that stigma? Realize that the notion of a female lawyer or doctor at one time had a stigma but I don't think it does anymore. What did they do right? What are we doing wrong?
7) Personal note:
I have mentored 58 High School Students. 56 were male, 2 were female.
I have mentored 45 ugrad students. 33 were male, 12 were female.
I have supervised 17 Masters students. 15 were male, 2 were female
I have supervised 7 PhD students, 6 were male, 1 was female.
The HS students stats are the most startling (at least to me). I don't have much control on this one as HS students seek me out and they happen to mostly be male. Reading that over it sounds weak on my part.
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