Math and CS are not the same thing. CS skews sharply male; mathematics significantly less so. That's borne out in the stats (there's like a 10-15% gap between CS and mathematics in PhDs), but you also notice it immediately if you've been to academic CS conferences (very male) and academic cryptography conferences (lots more women).
CS is basically an engineering degree. They are mostly focused on learning how to build things with a few theoretical courses as a foundation.
There are fully theoretical CS degrees out there, but that isn't the norm. Look at Stanford for example, one of the top rated schools in the world on this subject, and you can graduate with less theory courses than a typical engineer has to take.
So you'd expect CS to have a gender balance similar to most engineer degrees, which is what we see.
CS should be a lot more theoretical degree - rather than engineering in my opinion. I'll take NP-complete Automata theory, algorithms, game theory, philosophy discussions over "class, inheritance, OOP vs functional wars, engineering process" yawn fests anyday.
The CS/CE split is kind of supposed to handle this case.
I feel like students complain a lot about how tough theoretical CS can be. When I was in school, a lot of former CS staple courses were moved into the graduate program and replaced with lighter, more practical courses in undergrad (i.e., compiler theory replace with a comparative programming languages course that touched on JVM bytecode). They event went so far as to split BSCS and BACS by reducing the math requirements even further for the BA degree.
There are exceptions within engineering, yes. But it is mostly related to what you are building, chemical engineering is closely related to medicine, and women like medicine so it has better gender parity. In the degrees where you build/program things that moves you see more men.
In order to bridge that gap you'd need to tie programming to something women love as much as men loves working on machines that has moving parts.
Edit: And I've seen CS degree variants with heavy UX focus that tends to get 50/50 gender balance. It is really easy to shift gender balance in degrees this way, just shift it more to humans and you get more women, more to moving things and you get more men.
No, this doesn't feel like it holds up either. People looking to be doctors don't generally get chemistry PhD's. But those are the stats I'm looking at.
> People looking to be doctors don't generally get chemistry PhD's
What are you talking about, people with chemistry PhD's are by definition doctors. Are you talking about physicians? You don't need to be a physician to develop medicine, a chemistry phd is more than enough to join a pharma company.
