Blog Post

Many universities, organizations and “woke” corporations are increasingly committed to closing the gender gap in STEM and especially tech, and hundreds of millions, if not many billions of dollars have been spent on efforts to increase the female share of STEM degrees and jobs. For example, although they are illegal and violate Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination (and are therefore now being successfully challenged), hundreds of US universities spend millions of dollars every year offering single-sex, female-only STEM programs, summer camps, computer coding clubs, scholarships, awards, fellowships, initiatives, collectives, clubs, industry and networking events, and mentoring programs.

Then there are the nonprofit-organizations Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, and Latina Girls Code that have raised and spent millions of dollars “to support and increase the number of women in computer science by equipping young women with the necessary computing skills to pursue 21st-century opportunities…and close the gender employment difference in technology.” Girls Who Code lists nearly 200 corporate sponsors who have collectively provided tens of millions of dollars, with some corporations like AT&T, Lyft, Prudential, Uber, United Technologies and Walmart donating more than $1 million to the organization’s efforts to “close the gender gap in technology.”

And yet despite all of the money spent and all of the ongoing efforts devoted to the alleged “problem” of not enough women in STEM, perhaps closing the gender gap in technology might be an impossible mission. At least that is what the data are telling us. For example, the top chart above shows the female share of bachelor’s degrees in computer and information sciences from 1971 to 2017 based on data from the Department of Education. Women’s share of computer science degrees peaked at slightly above 37% in 1984 and has been on a gradual decline ever since and has been below 20% for more than a decade. Perhaps the massive efforts of universities and organizations like Girls Who Code stopped a further decline in the female share of computer science degrees and helped stabilize it at just below 20%. But to somehow “close the gender gap” and reach gender parity for tech degrees seems like a very, very expensive and futile fool’s errand that has no realistic chance of ever being achieved, no matter how much money “virtue signalling” and “woke” corporations direct to address the “problem.”

The bottom chart above provides additional empirical data illustrating the uphill and perhaps non-achievable goal of ever reaching anything close to gender parity in STEM and tech. Department of Education data are displayed for computer science degrees as a share of all bachelor’s degrees earned by men and women separately from 1980 to 2017. In 1986, 3% of college women earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Subsequently, the computer science share of all female bachelor’s degrees declined and fell below 1% in each of the years from 2007 to 2015 before increasing above 1% in 2016 and 2017. In contrast, computer science degrees represented 3% of all male bachelor’s degrees in the early 1980s and that share has been increasing over time and has more than doubled to just below 7% in 2017.

To have achieved gender parity in 2017 for computer science bachelor’s degrees, the percentage of women choosing a major in computer science would have had to increase from 1.2% to more than 5% (and not the full 7% because there are more women than men in college), and that percentage would have to be even higher in future years given the increasing popularity of computer science degrees among men. Organizations, corporations, and universities can spend many more billions of dollars, but it’s totally unrealistic to ever expect that the percentage of women selecting and finishing a bachelor’s degree in computer science will ever exceed the 3% peak back in 1986, much less rise to something like the +5% it would take in the future to reach gender parity in tech degrees. Just not gonna happen.

In 2018, senior lecturer Stuart Reges, who manages the introductory computer science classes at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, wrote a provocative and controversial article for Quillette titled “Why Women Don’t Code,” where he concluded that:

Our community must face the difficult truth that we aren’t likely to make further progress in attracting women to computer science. Women can code, but often they don’t want to. We will never reach gender parity. You can shame and fire all of the James Damores you find, but that won’t change the underlying reality. It’s time for everyone to be honest, and my honest view is that having 20 percent women in tech is probably the best we are likely to achieve. Accepting that idea doesn’t mean that women should feel unwelcome. Recognizing that women will be in the minority makes me even more appreciative of the women who choose to join us.

Although the data above, especially the top chart, confirm Reges’s assertion that a 20% female share of tech degrees and tech positions may be most the realistic outcome, that didn’t stop his university from demoting him and placing him on probation. And it won’t stop “woke” corporations from funneling millions and millions of dollars to single-sex, female-only STEM efforts at universities and organizations, some of them operating illegal programs in brazen violation of Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination, in search of the elusive and unattainable “holy grail” of gender parity in STEM and tech. But at some point in the future, billions of dollars from now, we’ll probably have to admit that the very, very expensive social engineering experiment of trying to artificially force more women in STEM and tech is a costly mission doomed to fail.