One anecdote that I heard from people involved with the CMU admissions criteria for CS. In addition to GPA, leadership skills, etc. they used to also look for something interesting technical that you'd done prior to college. They have now removed that criteria from the selection process because they found that it did not correlate with success upon coming to CMU, but it did correlate with gender.
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Well at least in Germany, there isn't any admissions process for CS. The quality of education is good, too.
We don't have significantly more women in CS than other countries, I think.
Could you provide a citation for that? I'd be VERY surprised if doing technical work before college did not correlate with success.
In my admittedly anecdotal experience (at a college way below the level of CMU), introductory programming classes had a classical bimodal distribution. There was a cluster of grades at 30 (people who weren't interested in programming) and another cluster at 80 (people who coded as a hobby and already knew nearly everything the class had to teach).
That's certainly true for the first programming class, but I don't think it has any effect on the first theory class.
You are completely wrong. I am very good friends with one of the Deans of SCS at CMU and have heard first hand from him that the reason CMU has more women in CS than the avg university is because they DON'T do this.
That's exactly what I said. They used to do this. Now they don't.
Whoops, sorry. Missed that part.