…this year went to Frances E Allen and while hearty congratulations are of course in order it’s actually something else in this LA Times report about the prize for computer science that I wanted to note. Allen is one of the very few women who have been working in the field since the 1950s and I don’t think that any of us would try to claim that there wasn’t discrimination then against women: either in the jobs they were hired for, training they received or from society in general.

However, there’s something else reported there, that in 1994 just under one fifth of those gaining college degrees in computer science were women and now that figure for such college degrees is 17%. Almost exactly the same actually. So we could ask ourselves whether this ridding ourselves of discrimination has come to something of a halt?

This is where we can look at our EQSQ personality tests. As we know, computer science and such related subjects like software programming and so on are very much systemizing, or male brain, ones. It wouldn’t be a surprise to us therefore if we found that those taking the college degrees were all male brains: whether they were male or female in sex. And as it happens, we have empirical evidence that some 17% of women have in fact the male type brain.

We can look at this in one of two (non-contradictory) ways: our theory is roughly confirmed by real world numbers or, the number of women taking computer science college degrees is about right.