According to that table, women's bachelor's degrees in computer science:

* were low in the 1970's, about 15% average

* were higher in the 1980's, about 35% average

* declined in the 1990's to about 25-30%

* steadily declined from 27 to 17% in the 2000's

It's interesting to see the actual numbers because it clearly shows there is/was a problem. Now, how best to solve it?

One issue with quotas is that the rate of women graduates can't necessarily keep up. It seems like we could use an influx of new students (in addition to the current efforts).

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_320.20.a...

We should definitely consider that women may have been discouraged from entering CS degree programs more than they were in the 70s, but at least in statistical terms, it seems like men just got more interested in the field for a variety of reasons and naturally came to massively outnumber the women interested in the field. Also see [3] since the new CS men had to come at the expense of other majors, and it's interesting to look at what they chose not to pursue (note: the stats are complicated by the fact that women represent an increasingly large overall percentage of college students over the same time period). Men seem to have declined as a % of graduates over the 80s-90s period most strongly in non-CS Engineering, physical sciences, and biology. This paints a really interesting picture since it's hard to argue a systemic push against women in science degrees when CS is pretty much the only one with an increasing gender imbalance issue over the same period.

[1] http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/cs181/project...

[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sc...

[3] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/supporting...

This is a bad premise. What sets CS apart from most sciences, and correlates perfectly with the 80s, is that it became a professional path to vast wealth (the rise of software giants like Microsoft). This supports the article which details some of the mechanisms by which the composition of CS was engineered to shift from women to men through a series of professional and cultural obstacles, once it was clear that software would be a high-paying career.

Let's shift it around another way and do a thought experiment. Public school teachers in the US today are overwhelmingly female and also rather poorly paid. What if tomorrow all the states decided that the starting salary for new teachers would be a minimum of $100k, and you would no longer need a teaching license. Do you think we wouldn't see more men suddenly entering the profession of public school teaching and dropping the percentage of women? I certainly think we would. Does that necessarily mean that men would be actively sabotaging women to keep them out of teaching entirely?

Consider that if as you believe men are more motivated to seek higher-paying positions, that would actually incentivize them to throw up obstacles to female competition. If the teaching profession suddenly shifted to mostly-male upon raising salaries, it would be correct to examine if sexism was at work. If we found marketing campaigns like "are you the man to command a classroom", "aptitude" tests that discriminated against women, and male-dominated professional societies acting as gatekeepers (to use some historical examples from our industry), they could very well lead to a significant gender imbalance.

A much more plausible explanation, at least, than women magically becoming disinterested in teaching because they have an aversion to making lots of money...

Again, I'm not saying women were not discriminated against (and continue to be subject to bias), but I don't buy that this is the primary reason why we have a large gender imbalance today.

Here's another question for you - medicine and law were massively male-dominated for a very long time, and yet both of those professions are now far closer to gender parity than tech is. Are we to believe that the anti-women practices that forced women out of tech were simply never applied to these other professions to keep women out? If so, why is tech a unique industry for this?

You note that "medicine and law were massively male-dominated for a very long time," yet confusingly you wonder whether "the anti-women practices that forced women out of tech were simply never applied to these other professions" (emphasis mine). Another possibility comes to mind: That anti-women practices were in fact applied to these professions, and some modicum of progress has been made in dismantling them, with varying degrees of success.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/26/pf/gender-pay-gap-doctors/

[2] https://www.lawcareers.net/Information/Features/06062017-Fem...

"Although junior lawyers are split roughly equally between male and female, the senior positions at law firms, barristers’ chambers and in the judiciary are still overwhelmingly dominated by one demographic – white, upper-class men"

Also, on your article references, you've shifted the discussion. We're talking about gender representation in professions, not income parity or senior-level representation, which have nuanced reasons for favoring one set of people over another (including bias). You need to answer the question of why women aren't even entering CS degree programs in the first place, while they enter med school and law school at close to parity with men.

Nor do I. I just gave two citations demonstrating that sexism has not been dismantled in medicine and law. You merely repeated your implication that no sexism exists today. You also failed to explain by what mechanism these fields changed from being "massively male-dominated" (your words). Did men suddenly lose their enhanced interest in "career paths with prestige and high earnings"?

I also very explicitly referred to "high-paying careers" in my original reply, which is the only sensible way to look at sexism, since delegating the more menial, lower-paying work to women is not equal representation.

> I also very explicitly referred to "high-paying careers" in my original reply, which is the only sensible way to look at sexism

What??? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Here's what you're saying if we follow your logic: If male person A wants to pursue a high-paying job, and female person B wants to pursue a low-paying job, sexism is keeping person B out of a high-paying career. That's not how sexism works. You're just arguing in circles here without showing me how the hypothesis that maybe women don't want to work in tech at the same rate as men is incorrect.

Someone else also pointed out that the U.S. population has increased by about 20% since the 1980s, so although the absolute number of women CS students are about the same, that still means it's proportionally going down.