But, why, though? Are you saying that women as a group are less capable of completing CS degrees than men?
I'm, personally, not really a fan of programs that are trying to shuffle people into a specific degree to improve employment representation rather examining what skills are necessary to do the job in the first place. The university as proxy for job training model, I feel, is perverse and doesn't necessarily serve students nor employers.
Instead, the problem is often that they have such a bad time, in those programs, due to the existence of a toxic culture, that they don't want to put up with that crap, and instead leave to get a job in industry that has a less bad culture (because they have other options).
Unfortunately, toxicity on all stages of the pipeline tends to drive out people who would be good engineers, but instead decide to do something else, because they have alternative options that don't suck so much, for cultural reasons.
Ironically, in my experience, the companies who figured this out a decade ago are the major finance companies. Hire anyone with a pulse, put in the effort to train them, be the only company on the block that isn't active treating these populations like shit, the you get retention rates that are unheard of in tech (especially for such comparativly shitty jobs by metric of pay and interesting things to do). Talent is there, tech companies just choose to ignore it and play into the existing biases ( and out right misogynistic streaks) that already exist.
Maybe 50% is a perfect ideal, but, don't let perfect be the enemy of better. We absolutely should be loudly shaming those at the top that "just can't find talent".
#rantsFromAnAngryTransWoman