I'd be interested to hear the source of the line that "in college women make up 52% of math and science majors"
I'm aware that chemistry maintains gender parity [1] and that medical schools are near-parity [2] (if you consider medicine to be math or science) but I'm not aware of a 52% figure covering all math and science.
On page 25 of the NCWIT scorecard it states that in 2009 women earned:
57% of all undergraduate degrees, 52% of all math and science degrees, 59% of the undergraduate degrees in biology, 42% of mathematics degrees, 18% of all computer and information sciences undergraduate degrees
We cross-checked 2 other sources for 2012 numbers as well.
I was really hoping to find a field CS could look to for inspiration on achieving-gender-equality done right.
Looking at citation 32 from the PDF you linked it seems to be based on IPEDS [1]. Their data, for 2010 bachelors degrees conferred:
IPEDS title | Table | Male | Female
Health professions and related sciences | 326 | 19,306 | 110,328
Biological and biomedical sciences | 314 | 35,865 | 50,535
Mathematics and statistics | 327 | 9,087 | 6,943
Physical sciences and science technologies | 328 | 13,862 | 9,517
Engineering and engineering technologies | 320 | 73,833 | 14,896
Computer and information sciences | 318 | 32,410 | 7,179
| | |
Total excluding health prof + related sci | | 165,057 | 89,070 (35% female)
Total including health prof + related sci | | 184,363 | 199,398 (52% female)
So we seem to be relying on "Health professions and related sciences" to bring the average up. I assume that's SIP code 51 but that seems like a very broad category [2] - for example it includes medicine, dentistry, nursing, yoga, dance therapy, and medical insurance coding.
I'm not sure science as a whole should be patting ourselves on the back yet. It would be nice if we could get to gender equality without lumping all medicine in with science.
Carnegie Mellon has done some amazing work that has raised female enrollment in Computer Science from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000. We're going to do a follow-up examining what they've done. In fact, one of our female engineers went to CMU!
I'm aware that chemistry maintains gender parity [1] and that medical schools are near-parity [2] (if you consider medicine to be math or science) but I'm not aware of a 52% figure covering all math and science.
[1] http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2012May/Yellowlees-w... [2] https://www.aamc.org/download/277026/data/aibvol12_no1.pdf