I'd rather play golf

This afternoon the Computing Research Association published its 2009-2010 Taulbee survey of Computer Science programs on its website.

As Patrick Thibodeau of Computerworld mentioned last month in a preview of the Taulbee results, enrollments are up approximately 10% year-over-year. In some cases the number of women in specific programs is marginally higher than in 2008-2009, which is encouraging. However, the number of women in Computer Science programs continues to significantly lag their male counterparts:

• in PhD programs, women made up 18.8% of graduates, down from 20.8% the previous year;
• in undergraduate programs, women made up 13.8% of graduates across all Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Information Systems programs, an increase of over 2% from the previous year (11.3%).

Unfortunately, some of these figures are influenced by which colleges and universities responded to the CRA survey, as survey participation was down this year, particularly in Canada:

In Canada, the number of new CS majors increased for the third straight year, by nearly 4 percent, but the total number of CS majors declined by nearly 8 percent. Bachelor’s degree production in Canada increased by more than 15 percent. These trends are significantly influenced by the specific departments reporting.

Hence it is difficult to determine whether the increase in Canadian Computer Science programs overall, and the proportion of women in those programs, is truly increasing.

My thanks to Wendy Powley of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, for the link to the Computerworld article by Patrick Thibodeau.