Women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in 2020 for the 12th straight year

Re:Women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in 2020 for... by ghaff on Friday October 15, 2021 @02:53PM (#28881569)

I'm willing to bet that a lot of the most senior (i.e. older) engineers in tech today, never touched a computer until university. That said, times are of course different. The idea that you'd teach a super-basic never touched a computer course to (non-CS) engineers using textbook like this at a top school [1] today is pretty much risible.

(There are exceptions. I'd characterize Charles Severance's MOOC from UMich as a true beginner class. But, by contrast, I think I'd find MIT's intro class in the CS department (6.001) impossibly difficult if I was having to basically learn to actually learn simple programming on the side.)

[1] https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colo...

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Re:Women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in 2020 for... by ajkjk on Friday October 15, 2021 @02:56PM (#28881619)

Yeah, could be. But in a CS degree program in the 2000s/2010s, the upper classes seemed to be 80% people who started coding on graphics calculators in middle school, or something equivalent.

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Re:Women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in 2020 for... by ghaff on Friday October 15, 2021 @03:43PM (#28882206)

I'm really talking about earlier. I didn't have a calculator until I started college :-) The first dip in bachelor's degrees in CS for women started in about 1985. [1] It dipped again beginning in about 2000.

[1]https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-the-declinin...

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