It seems every month or so, I read about some new plan to get more women into computer science. And there’s always a lof of ensuing discussion about why they tend to avoid CS.

Firstly, a lot of the oft-repeated reasons probably do contribute: Math and Computer Science are more competitive (the first day of frosh week we were literally comparing penis size math contest marks). They’re considered geeky and anti-social, although I think the people opening sockets, tracing physical location by looking at the binary and machine coding matrices on 24 are supposed to be CS types.

I’m going to propose another explanation: Women are more trusting and egalitarian when they choose their degrees.

Case in point, a friend of mine is changing her degree from philosophy to computer science. She’s smart, and she wants to make new things.

So why did she go into philosophy?

I think of philosophy as a backwater degree that you get to drink, meet girls and do twenty minutes of work a week for a few years because you aren’t ready to grow up.

Coming out of high school, however, she thought that philosophy was about thinking, understanding and digesting tough unsolved problems about the universe and the human condition — that there would be spirited debates running late into the night where great young minds would come to grips with great problems old and new.

She trusted a philosophy degree to live up to its impressive pedigree and the marketing material that universities provide.

In reality, over the millennia, the scientists left, the mathematicians left, the historians left, even the sociologists left. The philosophy degree that you’re left with is an attempt to cobble together a discipline without having to do anything difficult.

The other problem is that women are more inclined to believe that all degrees are equally valid (or at least to believe this idea is more true); that sociology students study equally difficult problems from a sociological perspective, for instance.

The egalitarian approach becomes problematic when you look at the different disciplines as being equals because you can be swayed more easily by prejudices about them. The stereotypical picture of a hacker staying up all night working on code becomes “a different way of solving problems” not a reflection of the difficulty involved.

If you thought you could solve problems sitting in couches at a coffee shop talking about them instead of by unit testing and stepping through a debugger, which would you choose? Thinking that deciding “we need to make the product more responsive” and implementing a caching mechanism are both equivalent contributions is a deceptively tantalizing and strangely common but ridiculous mentality.

I’m hesitant to propose somehow making high school students less naive and trusting. Although being more honest about how degrees really differ would probably be helpful, a school gets just as much tuition from a student studying basket-weaving as biology so I can’t figure out who would benefit enough to actually do this. So I have nothing in terms of a solution.

There probably are some residual elements of an old boys club, but I suspect they’re fading away (my highschool CS teacher was a woman). I suspect that the percentages of females in CS will stabilize in the 25-35% range and the calls for something to be done about that will stabilize in the noise-from-groups-that-are-upset-about-everything range.

Discalimer: I’m gender agnostic when it comes to people’s skills, this is only one of thousands of possible explanations to this gender imbalance. I reserve the right to change my mind to better suit the evidence.