A New York Times blogger, Claire Cain Miller, recently praised Carnegie Mellon, Harvey Mudd College, and the University of Washington for increasing the percentage of women in computer science (and, in the case of Harvey Mudd, engineering).

I worry about the effort. Why is it so important to woo women? Aren’t they able to decide for themselves what they want to do? And is computer science really a good place to find high-paying jobs?

In any case, the things these schools are doing to attract women in to “STEM” ranged from the obvious to the dubious.

  • Harvey Mudd put more pictures of women in its brochures and bought in more women to guide campus tours.
  • Carnegie Mellon created a mentoring program and stopped requiring programming experience to enter the program.
  • The University of Washington revised its introductory course to focus on “creative and real-world applications.” (That’s the dubious one to me.)

Miller turned up an interesting statistic. Many “experts” lament the fact that only 18 percent of computer science graduates are women. In 1985 the figure was 37 percent. Do women know something that the experts don’t?