The Lack Of Women In Computer Science Isn’t The Cause Of Tech’s Diversity Problem

9 min readMar 8, 2019

The OTHER Problem With The 60 Minutes’ Piece About Getting More Women In Tech

On Monday, the amazing and wonderfully outspoken founder of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saunjani, wrote a fantastic Medium post calling out the producers of CBS’s 60 Minutes program for not featuring a single woman-led organization in their “Closing the gender gap in the tech industry” segment.

Saunjani’s essay was followed up by the incredible Ayah Bier, founder of littleBits, who detailed how she was originally slated to be featured in the 60 Minutes segment, but the producers cut her interview in favor of other interviewees (presumably Hadi Partovi of Code.org whose interview served as the basis for the segment) because she had not made the points as “effectively.”

When I first read Saunjani’s essay my immediate response was an eyeroll, not over her essay but the 60 Minutes segment. There the media and the tech industry goes again doing what it does: having a totally unproductive conversation about women in tech. I almost opted out of watching it.

But after spending more time thinking about it, and reading Ayah’s piece, I decided to sit down and watch the segment so that I could at least have an informed opinion of the piece itself.

Having now seen it, I would like to officially and publicly co-sign on every complaint that Reshma and Ayah made, and make another big one of my own.

In addition to erasing the efforts of many, many, many WOMEN from the story of the fight to get more women into tech, the segment offers only an incredibly limited and problematic explanation for why there is a diversity problem in tech in the first place. Now, this explanation is by NO MEANS limited to 60 Minutes. I’ve seen it trotted out over and over, and it embodies a set of unproductive and disempowering beliefs that I, and my staff, have to spend a great deal of time talking our students out of.

Which is to say that the 60 Minutes segment is only a catalyst for me to publicly refute these very pervasive points — ones that haunt the work we do and that inspired me to start Skillcrush in the first place.

Using its interviews with Hadi Partovi of Code.org and Bonnie Ross, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, CBS essentially positioned it like this:

Girls lose interest in STEM fields in junior high, the so-called “middle school cliff”
By the time they’re in college it’s “too late” to get them interested in computer science
Because women don’t get computer science degrees, there’s nowhere near enough qualified women to be software engineers

For many reasons this narrative is convenient for people in tech: it identifies the problem as something endemic to girls, largely intractable, and importantly, something that happens so early in girl’s lives that — and this was said in the 60 Minutes segment — by the time they reach college, it’s too late.

I believe that the tech community’s unilateral focus on this explanation for why there aren’t women in tech is exactly WHY the tech industry hasn’t diversified.

More importantly, when the media or tech leaders promote this narrative, they’re actively working against getting more women into tech because it furthers two of the most deeply problematic — and women-repelling — ideas:

If you aren’t interested in computer science from a young age, you’ve missed the boat.
In order to work as a developer, you have to have a computer science degree.

I’m not here to say “Stop funding programs that encourage girls to take an interest in STEM at an early age” or that we shouldn’t talk about ways to get more women to major in computer science as undergrads. But what’s fundamentally missing from this conversation are the women who are interested in tech but don’t fit within those neatly set definitions. And let’s be perfectly clear: they’re sick and tired of not being heard.

Every single day, I field questions from prospective students, most of them women, all of them interested in working in tech, and ALL OF THEM worried that they are too old or that they can’t compete because they don’t have computer science degrees.

Luckily for the women asking me these questions, I can reassure them that neither of these issues (age or degree) will actually prevent them from being successful in tech. It’s what we do at Skillcrush every day. But just imagine how many women are out there who don’t ever even make it to us to ask.

So let me address the three core parts of CBS’s argument one-by-one with those women in mind:

Point #1: Girls lose interest in STEM fields in junior high

Yes, there is data to back up the idea that girls lose interest in STEM in junior high, but even that data isn’t without its complications. For example, what qualifies as “losing interest”?

When you’re looking at elementary school kids, it’s virtually impossible to provide hard data to prove girls’ interest (or lack thereof), while if you look at more material data points like enrollment in AP science courses, the data is actually really mixed. In 2013, girls were near parity in most of the AP science fields such as Calculus AB, statistics, and chemistry. Of course the gender ratio in AP Computer Science in 2013 was…absurd (81% males vs. 19% females).

So even if we assume that girls DO indeed lose interest, the argument relies on this fact being immutable and, as it turns out, there are a ton of interventions that are working!

The success of organizations and companies like Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, littleBits, GoldieBlox, Code.org and many many more to get girls engaged with computer science and engineering, and the resulting increase in enrollment in AP Computer Science (it’s grown to just shy of 27% female in 2017), is proof positive that changing girl’s attitude towards technology is possible.

Point #2: By the time they’re in college they’re a lost cause

As I conceded above, there is some data to back up this idea that girls may lose interest in STEM in middle school, but where things really get interesting is when you start to look at what happens to women in college when it comes to ALL the STEM fields, despite the “middle school cliff.” According to the National Science Board, women’s interest in many STEM fields rebounds in college just fine:

In 2013 women accounted for:

39% of undergraduate degrees in Physical Sciences
58% of undergraduate degrees in Biological & Agricultural sciences
And 43% of undergraduate degrees in Mathematics

Imagine if there wasn’t a middle school cliff…would ALL biology majors be women?

So what we see is that this middle school cliff is ONLY plausibly an issue in two STEM fields: computer science and engineering where, in 2013, women accounted for only:

17.9% of undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and
19.3% of undergraduate degrees in Engineering

The problem with putting this on women and their “lack of interest” or the “middle school cliff” is that it absolves computer science departments of responsibility. Why, no, it’s not that women are making a completely rational decision to avoid a field that’s famous for its misogyny. No no, they lost interest in middle school!

The irony to me is that computer science actually has a HUGE gargantuan unfathomable advantage over the other science fields (particularly with regards to engineering) because we all interact with technology all day, every day. This should be a lay up! And yet…computer science is dead last and trending downward.

So what then? Here’s a wild thought: what if the lack of interest in tech education stems from the fact that the tech industry suffers from a MASSIVE lack of creativity, plus some seriously sub-par marketing skills? Oh, and also misogyny.

If the tech industry wants to see the gender ratios balanced, they need to clean up their own house.

At the end of the day, I know that it’s possible to get women interested in tech and coding and generally kicking ass, even when they’re in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and later (gasp!) because I have 17,000 Skillcrush alums — over 80% of them women — to prove it!

(To put my 17,000 graduates in context, that’s almost double the 8,900 women who graduated with computer science degrees in 2015).

The only lost cause here is whoever decided that once women get to college, nothing can be done.

Point #3: Because women don’t get computer science degrees there’s not enough qualified women

This is the argument that makes me RAGE.

Now, I understand that companies like Facebook and Microsoft and Google may have “standards” for their software developers and those “standards” include expecting everyone to have a computer science degree. I will address that in a bit.

Using Microsoft, however, and their hiring standards as a representative of the entire tech industry or representative of tech workers writ large is poor reporting. The data simply doesn’t support it.

Let me give you some data as a counter: according to a 2018 Stack Overflow survey, which surveyed over 100,000 developers only 74.6% had undergraduate degrees and of those 64.4% of them were CS degree holders.

This means that less than half (48%) of the 85,710 survey responders who identified themselves as “professional developers” hold a computer science degree, and the survey was only talking to tech workers who fit into the “software developer” bucket.

This might be a good moment to point out that Bill Gates holds neither a computer science nor college degree.

Meanwhile, talk to any non-profit, marketing agency, hotel, bank, insurance company (I by the way, talk to many of them on the regular), and see if they aren’t employing a range of tech workers in all manner of different roles and yes, the VAST majority of them without computer science degrees.

So listen, if you want to make sure that your company is NOT diversified, then you should definitely require all your software developers to have computer science degrees. It’s actually a brilliant solution because you can rely on computer science departments all over the country to repel women on your behalf while providing you with the ability to claim that it’s a “pipeline” problem! #winning

The GOOD NEWS about the 60 Minutes piece is that although Hadi Partovi did espouse some ideas I didn’t love, his organization Code.org is actually a great example of creating innovative solutions for some of these problems.

They are both intervening with girls at a young age and engendering positive experiences with technology and also working to dismantle this notion that you can’t do anything in tech without a computer science degree.

My favorite part of the segment was an interview with Alexis Dixon, a 4th grade teacher working in Brooklyn, who received training from Code.org to teach computer science at her school and is doing it! Even though she doesn’t have a computer science degree!

This also queued up my OTHER favorite part of the piece where Sharyn Alfonsi, the segment host goes “It sounds crazy to say you don’t need to be a computer scientist to teach computer science. Don’t you? Shouldn’t you be?” Sharyn, call me!

The even BETTER news is that I have a whole binder full of women led organizations that are attacking this problem from every step along the way: starting with the pipeline, then going onto hiring, retention, promotion, and entrepreneurship!

Although I will attempt to list many of them here, I would never presume to be able to create an exhaustive list and encourage you to look at resources such as Hire More Women In Tech for further resources on this very topic.

And if you’d like to discuss this topic with me more, I’d love to talk! Send me an email at adda@skillcrush.com.