Few Women in Computer Science

Thanks to the Kept-Up Academic Librarian for pointing out an article in Campus Technology about a new report by the National Center for Women & Information Technology that shows that women are losing serious ground in the fields of information technology and computer science.

According to the report, while women earned 60 percent of all college degrees in the United States in the 2005-6 academic year, a mere “11 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer engineering and 15 percent in computer science went to women,” the reporter, David Nagel, notes. Those statistics are particularly grim when one considers that a higher percentage (36 percent) of women earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science back in 1983, he adds. So much for progress.

But wait, there’s more bad news. Despite a rising number of women earning doctoral degrees in computer and information sciences, a paltry 16 percent of assistant professors in computer science are women, down from 20 percent in 1995-96, and the numbers dwindle further “the higher one looks up the academic and corporate ladder,” Nagel reports.

Those are sorry statistics indeed.