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Females only make up about 10% of the CS program enrollees, I highly doubt the females in this list are as good as their male counterparts. 5 out of 100 is good, you are getting only the top 5% though. 5 out of 1000 is better, since you are taking that top 5% and taking the top 10% of that.

discuss

matthewmacleod|11 years ago

In 2010, 18% of graduating CS & Information Science students were female. You can't even get your numbers right.

This is actually a shocking state of affairs, given that in 1985 this number was 37%. That blatantly suggests (to me at least) that there's no gender-related skill differential in this field, and instead women are being discouraged for other reasons.

wfunction|11 years ago

Your math doesn't even make sense. 10% of the enrollees should result in 10% of the top 5%, aka 10% of the entire list. Never mind whether your numbers are even correct.

imaginenore|11 years ago

While your numbers "5 out of 100" and "5 out of 1000" are way off, there are disproportionately many girls on this list.

I would expect to see around 20% of girls.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/computerworld.com/files...

Which makes me question the quality of the list.

gutnor|11 years ago

Or maybe the relatively few female that persevere in a field that is biased against them are going to be better on average ?

At my university in engineering and applied sciences ( weird but that's the official translation in English ), one of our teacher was the first woman to graduate. She was very good, she had to be better than the average to prove that the school did not make a mistake in letting her in.

sokoloff|11 years ago

Gender biased, much?

Given the low overall enrollment, it wouldn't surprise me if the ones who "bother" to join the CS program are more driven and intrinsically motivated than the average. Given that drive and intrinsic motivation are likely highly correlated with excellence within their peer group, it seems well within reason that a minority group overall would be over-represented in the elite set.

imaginenore|11 years ago

> Given the low overall enrollment, it wouldn't surprise me if the ones who "bother" to join the CS program are more driven and intrinsically motivated than the average.

But that's true about the guys too. People who don't like programming get weeded out pretty quickly from CS.