[calvinlough]

"Then there's this freshmen drop-off, where all but about 80% of women end up changing their major, usually to something involving design or business."

In other words, 20% of women end up changing their major. I'm guessing it was worded this way to trick those that skim read into thinking that 80% of women change their major.

[rdl]

It's a dumb stat even if they just said 20% change, without knowing how many men (or students overall, since men + women = total) also change major after the first year.

But the "1/3 as many women go into the program" is a meaningful stat. The most meaningful stat is "how good are the graduates", and from what I've seen, the graduates of Hackbright have been quite good.

[makomk]

Your mistake is to try and apply things like logic and rules of evidence; we're in feminist-land, where those rules don't apply, and where if you don't accept statistics about one gender as evidence something is gendered you're an anti-woman troll trying to distract from the real issuea affecting women.

[rdl]

Occam's razor would point to someone not being a perfect statistical writer or good editor, here, rather than pushing a a secret agenda. It's pretty clear that Hackbright's agenda is their overt one -- to increase the number of women in tech. They don't really need to hide that; I think the majority of people support their mission.

[LukeShu]

Some people use the phrase "all but" when they don't mean it. It's like when people use "literally" to mean "figuratively". The real unfortunate part of this is now we don't know which way they meant it.

[dragonwriter]

> Some people use the phrase "all but" when they don't mean it.

Actually, the problem is that some people use the phrase "all but" in its well established idiomatic sense which is conventionally used to modify a non-quantitative description (where it means "almost" -- e.g., "He all but went bankrupt) when it is modifying a quantitative description, where it has a very different meaning -- from the individual words -- as "all except".

Note that the former definition (but not the latter, which is just a fairly direct combination of "all" and "but") is in most good dictionaries, and has examples in print stretching back to the 16th century, so its hardly reasonable to say that people saying it don't mean "all but". Its very much a long-established part of the language.

Its confusing and should be avoided in quantitative contexts because of the way it conflicts with the normal use of the individual words, but likewise "all but" in the sense of "all except" should be avoided in preference to, e.g., "all except" in the same circumstances, because of the danger of confusion with the idiomatic sense of "all but".

[LukeShu]

The two meanings you present are the same meaning. It could roughly be "all except" in either case.

    > (where it means "almost" -- e.g., "He all but went bankrupt)

This makes sense with the individual words. On the scale of loosing money, he did everything up to, but not including, going bankrupt. He did everything except going bankrupt; which is almost going bankrupt.

I see your point that because in a non-quantitative description, it effectively means "almost", people might confusedly use it to mean "almost" in quantitative descriptions, without thinking about what it means.

    > Actually, the problem is ...

So, I cede that that is a problem, but I don't agree with the "actually." There are people who don't realize that it means "almost", and might say "He all but went bankrupt" to mean that he really went bankrupt.

[dragonwriter]

> "[...] where all but about 80% of women end up changing their major [...]"

> In other words, 20% of women end up changing their major.

Or very nearly 80% [1]. Its generally just better to avoid "all but" in quantitative contexts; in qualitative contexts its clear, but in quantitative ones its clear-as-mud.

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/all%20but

[calvinlough]

Ah, very interesting. I never even thought about it that way. So maybe the author wasn't trying to be misleading, but just chose their words poorly.

[jack-r-abbit]

I've never thought of "all but" to mean "very nearly". I've always thought of "all but" to mean "everything except". So in (probably) all the cases where "very nearly" works, so does "everything except". Unfortunately, the reverse is not true. I too thought her "all but about 80% switch" meant "everyone except about 80% switch" or in other words "about 20% switch". I thought it was weird to word it that way.

[jacalata]

Best actual numbers I could find: 40% of the intro class (CS106A) were female, and up to 20% of the graduating class. (http://sheplusplus.stanford.edu/sheStatistics.pdf). I can't find the percentage of women among those who declare the CS major. From elsewhere, there are about 600 students in the intro course, 220 people declare the major, and 80 graduate. So 240 women in CS106A and 16 graduate. To argue that less than 80% of women drop out after declaring, we have to assume that 80 or fewer women declared a CS major, which means they made up approximately 1/3 of the declaring students, which sounds plausible to me.

The corresponding stats for male majors would be 140 declare the major and 64 graduate, so they lose 55% of declared students. Also pretty high, but the difference is large enough to be worth looking at.

disclaimer: these numbers are from the internet, definitely not dealing with the same cohort at each step, and may be quite wrong. If anyone has better ones, do share.

[icyfenix]

Totally fucked up that wording, sorry 'bout that. Edited, fixed. Also, numbers and research : http://lizthedeveloper.com/pedagogy-and-why-we-only-accept-w...