Q: Is the declining share of female computer science bachelor’s degrees, despite the massive amount of resources, funding, attention and promotion of trying to get “girls to code,” evidence of a failed social engineering effort/experiment?
Perhaps gender activists could make the case that without the national obsession to increase the female share of computer science degrees there would have been an even greater decline in that share, and that therefore the stable female share of computer science degrees at 18% is a sign of success?? But I think you could make a stronger case that the significant ten percentage point decline in the female share of computer science degrees from 28% to 18%, despite the significant resources, funding and attention toward increasing female participation in computer science, is fairly strong evidence that the social engineering experiment to get “girls to code” has failed.
Chart of the Day: The declining female share of computer science degrees from 28% to 18% | American Enterprise Institute – AEI %
Update: I originally was only able to find data from the Department of Education website for bachelor degrees by field and gender back to 1993 and created the top chart above. Over the weekend, I was able to access historical college degree data back to 1970 and created the second chart above.