At UC Berkeley, the EECS department has struggled with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion for decades. The Daily Cal has been reporting on diversity initiatives since 2012, with a number of articles published since then highlighting small fraction of female graduates in computer science (2013), projects studying gender breakdowns by major (2016), columns discussing the toxic stress culture perpetuated by a homogenous student body, and Op-Eds urging students and faculty to uplift women in tech (2019).

Over the past few years, the EECS department has taken strides towards addressing these complex issues – a multi-page website highlights some of the initiatives taken by the department.

Despite these efforts, transparency around applications, admissions, and student demographics in the department has been lacking over the past few years; the department's By the Numbers focuses more on statistics concerning the overall number of undergraduates and awarded degrees, rather than identifying concrete data regarding demographic backgrounds in the department. Without transparency around these fundamental data points, it's difficult to know where we've come from, where we currently lie, and where we should focus our efforts on in the future.

In this analysis, I present a variety of different insights into both historical and present-day surrounding diversity in computer science at Berkeley. This is a two-part series. This article contains an analysis of Undergraduate Applications data for freshman applying into EECS or L&S CS, spanning from 2000 to the upcoming academic year (2020-21). The second article will contain an analysis of departmental census data.

Read the full analysis: https://shomil.me/eecs-diversity/