The incredible shrinking pipeline

The pipeline shrinkage problem concerning women in computer science is a known phenomenon. Although women make up 50% of high school computer science (CS) classes, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in CS awarded to women in the 1993-94 academic year was only 28.4%. At the graduate level, for the academic year 1993-94, the percentages of degrees in CS awarded to women dropped even further: 25.8% at the M.S. level and 15.4% at the Ph.D. level. In addition, for women who become faculty members, the pipeline shrinks through the academic ranks. The percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded in CS to women decreased almost every year over the last decade. In other words, not only does the pipeline shrink from high school to graduate school, but it also shrinks at the bachelor's level. There are a number of reasons why we need to improve the percentage of degrees awarded in CS to women. In short, there is a critical labor shortage in CS and, although women are more than half the population, they are a significantly underrepresented percentage of the population earning CS degrees.