Counterpoints (though your arguments are well-taken):<p>&gt;This is accurate, but it&#x27;s looking at the symptoms, not the cause<p>You&#x27;re claiming that gender studies is a response, rather than a cause.  It takes some serious mental gymnastics to claim that a <i>very</i> politically active group is not exercising significant causal influence.  It&#x27;s their stated goal to &quot;raise awareness&quot;, which implies heavy recruiting.  It stands to reason that recruitment efforts will be more effective with man than with women, and the measures agree.<p>Regardless of whether or not gender studies departments are responsible for reducing female STEM majors, women prefer working with people rather than things (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;19883140" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;19883140</a>), and this across all disciplines.  Granted, this can be the result of social conditioning, but the point remains that the positive claim &quot;gender gap = symptom&quot; requires positive evidence.<p>&gt;CS&#x2F;Eng as a community is not caring and welcoming as Gender Studies would be<p>Now you&#x27;re implicitly  making a normative claim:  &quot;CS&#x2F;Eng should be as welcoming as Gender Studies&quot;.  The problem is that the highest priority of gender studies is to promote social justice and cohesion, so that&#x27;s not a reasonable milestone for whether or not another field is just and cohesive <i>enough</i>.  The implied argument here is that if engineers make social justice their number-one priority, then little engineering gets done.