> It is popular to characterize the gender gap in tech in terms of a pipeline problem: not enough girls studying math and science. However, there are several indications that this may no longer be the case, at least not to the extent that it once was. High school girls and boys participate about equally in STEM electives. Elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley now report that about 50% of their introductory computer science students are women. Yet just last year, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that men are employed in STEM occupations at about twice the rate of women with the same qualifications.

Looking more into this, there are some other problems.

The link cited for "High school girls and boys participate about equally in STEM electives" says "Girls are taking many high level mathematics and science courses at similar rates as their male peers, with the exception of physics and engineering, and are performing well overall". Note that part about engineering being an exception. For engineering, their source says the ratio of boys to girls is 6 to 1.

I'd expect engineering is most relevant for most tech jobs, and in that boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in high school. That sure doesn't sound like the pipeline problem is no longer a major factor.

Their same source also has stats for college. Women earn 50.3% of the science and engineering bachelor's degrees, but like high school this varies by field. It was 18.2% in computer science and 18.4% in engineering. I don't see any sign here either that the pipeline problem is diminishing.

Interestingly, women get 43.1% of the bachelor's degrees in math and statistics. I'm surprised there is that big of a difference between math and CS.

In the workforce, the same source says that women are 13% in engineering, and 25% in computer and mathematical sciences (it is very annoying that CS and math are separate in the college stats and combined in the workplace stats).

Note the significant drop from degrees to workforce. In engineering, women are 18.4% of the degrees, but only make up 13% of the working engineers. I wonder if that gap could be due to the difficulty of having children while maintaining one's career, which is definitely harder for women than men since women are the ones that actually give birth?

I'm beginning to think that the main causes of the gender gap in tech are the pipeline problem and the atrocious maternity and paternity leave standards in the US.

Most of Europe, I believe, has much much much much better maternity and paternity leave than the US does. Does anyone have any stats on if women who go into tech in Europe are more likely to stay compared to US tech women? Note that the data we want for this is not just the percentage of women in tech there compared to the US, because the pipelines into tech might be different. I think the number we want is, for various tech areas, percentage of women getting degrees in these areas and percentage of women in the workforce in those areas.

If maternity and paternity leave make a different, my prediction is that the percentages in the workforce will be closer to the percentages getting degrees in Europe than it is in the US.

One more interesting thing. The source the article cites for the pipeline data also gives a breakdown of the workforce by various science and engineering fields. Here are the percentages:

45.9% of chemists and material scientists
28.9% of environmental scientist and geoscientists
22.3% of chemical engineers
17.8% of industrial engineers
13.1% of civil engineers
8.8% of electrical and electronics engineers
5.5% of mechanical engineers

I can see traditional differences in the way boys and girls are raised explaining why women are better represented in biological sciences than in physical sciences or engineering, but I cannot think of anything that would explain why the representation of women various so much between different engineering fields. I can't think of anything that would have made me guess that women would be much better represented in chemical engineering than civil engineering, and in civil engineering than electrical engineering.