Report

Pre-College

• More than 60% of the 1.5 million students surveyed who reported no high school computer coursework or experience at all were girls.
• AP research indicates that students taking an AP exam in a given subject area are more likely to take college coursework in that area than students who do not take the AP exam. Yet only 1% of AP exam-takers — whether male or female — took a computer science AP exam in 2009. Increasing the number of girls — and boys — at this stage of the pipeline would be good news for an industry in need of able minds.
• In middle school, 74% of girls express interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), but when choosing a college major, just 0.4% of high school girls select computer science.

College

• Women make up only 18% of all bachelor degrees in computer and information science.
• The gap between males and females receiving degrees in computer science has widened since the beginning of the 21^st century.
• Women representation in overall STEM subjects have been increasing over time, but women representation specifically in computer and information sciences has decreased in the past 15 years; currently, women are least represented in computer and information sciences out of all STEM subjects.

Academia

• The female percentage of computing faculty has increased substantially at all ranks since 2002. Still, the higher the faculty rank, the fewer the women. Even allowing for academic hiring and promotion practices that result in slow changes in the population of full professors, computing lags behind the rest of academia, where women comprised between 20% and 30% of full professors in 2005-2006.
• Studies have shown that women and other minorities are discriminated against when asking professors for mentorship.
• A common finding for most senior women faculty was that the women were "invisible", excluded from a voice in their departments and from positions of any real power.

Industry

• Research shows that five primary barriers often lead women to leave the technical workplace:
  1. unconscious bias
  2. isolation
  3. supervisory relationships
  4. promotion processes
  5. competing life responsibilities
• Even though women have successfully co-founded high-tech start-ups with less funding and fewer failures than the average, only about 8% of start-ups are majority-owned by women.
• Diversity may contribute to creativity. “Mixed-gender teams produced the most frequently cited patents — with citation rates that were 26% to 42% higher than the average rate for patents of similar age and type.”