Communications of the ACM
Forget Tech's Bad Bros: Stanford, Berkeley Boost Female Computing Grads
Tammy Nguyen, a senior computer science major at UC Berkeley, is weighing a software-engineering job offer from a major Silicon Valley company.
Credit: Bay Area News Group
More and more women are getting computer science and electrical engineering degrees from the Bay Area's two elite universities, a goal U.S. colleges have been pursuing for decades.
Since 2010, Stanford has steadily driven up the proportion of undergraduate women receiving degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from 11 percent to a record 31 percent in 2017, according to university data. UC Berkeley has doubled the percentage of women receiving those degrees during the same period, from 11 percent in 2010 to 22 percent in 2017, school data shows. That runs counter to a national trend, in which the proportion of women receiving degrees in computer and information sciences has dropped from a high of 37 percent in 1984 to about 18 percent in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Boys are typically introduced to computing and computer games much earlier than girls. Berkeley and Stanford took a number of different steps to address that. They changed their introductory computer science classes to attract students with varying experience levels. Berkeley added introductory data science and computer science courses specifically aimed at students with no prior programming experience.
From The Mercury News
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