Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Women and non-Asian minority CS faculty and PhD student populations (in 2006)

Well, people can say what they like about the NRC rankings, but just looking at the data for the CS departments, I see some pretty graphs here, and some potentially promising correlations.


(See that outlier on the right? Three cheers for Tufts! 56% female faculty, baby.)


(I'm not pleased with that huge cluster of 0% non-Asian minority faculty. But three cheers for FIU, Iowa, and Auburn!)

I haven't yet started removing outliers or doing anything fancy, but for kicks I ran some correlations on these four variables of interest:


For anyone not used to reading ugly SPSS outputs, we find a significant correlation between non-Asian minority CS faculty and non-Asian minority CS PhD students, r = .308, p < .01. We also find a sig. correlation between female CS faculty and female CS PhD students, r = .281, p < .01. And, it turns out if there are non-Asian minority PhD CS students there is also a high likelihood of female PhD CS students, r = .247, p  < .01.

These are not super-huge correlations, and it's likely the outliers are conflating things, but it's still promising just from the graphs. If I have time over the weekend I'll play with the data a bit more formally and see what turns up.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting. I'm been playing around with some of the NRC data also. Have you compared faculty numbers with recent graduate numbers? I've found that there's a slight drop of in the minority percentage.

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  2. Hi Marcus. Actually, I stopped playing with the data because there were so many complaints about it's veracity. (And, more importantly, my "real" job kept getting in the way :-)). But I'd be interested to hear what you discover.

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