Accounting for the Role of Policy in the Underrepresentation of Women in Computer Science
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the 1990s, a great deal of effort has been toward improving female participation in computing. Yet the numbers in North America haven't budged: women continue to make up 18\% of CS majors. Current efforts and research focus on societal, cultural, and psychological reasons for this underrepresentation. I argue that the political dimension also needs to be considered both in terms of why women are underrepresented and how to change it. I have found that admissions policies have a profound effect on how many women study undergraduate CS. I've also observed that diversity is not being considered in mainstream CS department policymaking, and ``women's issues'' are expected to be solved by women's groups. And in the women's spaces, I've observed a focus on individual career advancement (``Lean In'') rather than a push for political, collective action.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.032 | 0.081 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".