We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring.

By Aline Lerner | Published: December 2, 2019; Last updated: January 23, 2026

If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you probably won’t make many friends (or many hires). The pipeline problem argument goes something like this: “There aren’t enough qualified women out there, so it’s not our fault if we don’t hire them.”

Many people don’t like this reductive line of thinking because it ignores the growing body of research that points to unwelcoming environments that drive underrepresented talent out of tech: STEM in early education being unfriendly to children from underrepresented backgrounds, lack of a level playing field and unequal access to quality STEM education (see this study on how few of California’s schools offer AP Computer Science for instance), hostile university culture in male-dominated CS programs, biased hiring practices, and ultimately non-inclusive work environments that force women and people of color to leave tech at disproportionately high rates.1

However, because systemic issues can be hard to fix (they can take years, concerted efforts across many big organizations, and even huge socioeconomic shifts), the argument against the pipeline problem tends to get reduced to “No, the candidates are there. We just need to fix the bias in our process.”

This kind of reductive thinking is also not great. For years, companies have been pumping money and resources into things like unconscious bias training (which has been shown not to work), anonymizing resumes, and all sorts of other initiatives, and the numbers have barely moved. It’s no wonder tech eventually succumbs to a “diversity fatigue” that comes from trying to make changes and not seeing results.

We ran the numbers and learned that there really IS a pipeline problem in hiring — there really aren’t enough women to meet demand… if we keep hiring the way we’re hiring. Namely, if we keep over-indexing on CS degrees from top schools, and even if we remove unconscious bias from the process entirely, we will not get to gender parity. And yes, there is a way to surface strong candidates without relying on proxies like a college degree. We’ll talk about that toward the end.

Our findings ARE NOT meant to diminish the systemic issues that make engineering feel unwelcome to underrepresented talent, nor to diminish our ability to work together as an industry to effect change — to enact policy changes like access to CS in public schools, for instance. Our findings ARE meant to empower those individuals already working very hard to make hiring better who find themselves frustrated because, despite their efforts, the numbers aren’t moving. To those people, we say, please don’t lose sight of the systemic problems, but in the short term, there are things you can do that will yield results. We hope that, over time, by addressing both systemic pipeline issues and biases, we will get to critical mass of women from all backgrounds in engineering positions, and that these women, in turn, will do a lot to change the pipeline problem by providing role models and advocates and by changing the culture within companies.

Lastly, an important disclaimer before we proceed. In this post, we chose to focus on gender (and not on race). This decision was mostly due to the dearth of publicly available data around race and intersectionality in CS programs/bootcamps/MOOCs.2 While this analysis does not examine race and intersectionality, it is important to note that we recognize: 1) Not all women have the same experience in their engineering journey, and 2) tech’s disparities by gender is no more important than the lack of representation of people of color in engineering. We will revisit these subjects in a future post.

The percentage of women engineers is low and likely worse than reported

It’s very hard to have a cogent public conversation about diversity when there is no standardization of what statistic means what. As this post is about engineering specifically, we needed to find a way to get at how many women engineers are actually in the market and work around two big limitations in how FAAMNG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Netflix) report their diversity numbers.

The first limitation is that FAAMNG’s numbers are global. Why does this matter? It turns out that other countries, especially those where big companies have their offshore development offices, tend to have a higher percentage of female developers.3 In India, for instance, about 35% of developers are women; in the U.S., it’s 16%. Why are these numbers reported globally? The cynic in me says that it’s likely because the U.S. numbers, on their own, are pretty dismal, and these companies know it.4 To account for this limitation and get at the U.S. estimate, we did some napkin math and conservatively cut each company’s female headcount by 20%.

The second limitation is that reported numbers are based on “technical roles,” which Facebook at least defines very broadly: “A position that requires specialization and knowledge needed to accomplish mathematical, engineering, or scientific related duties.” I expect the other giants use something similar. What are the implications of this fairly broad definition? Given that product management and UX design count as technical roles, we did some more napkin math and removed ~20% to correct for PMs and designers.5

With these limitations in mind, below is a graph comparing the makeup of the U.S. population to its representation in tech at FAAMNG companies where said data was available, as well as an estimate of women in engineering specifically.

There's still a lot of work to do if we want to reach gender parity in engineering

If we want to reach gender parity in engineering, especially when we correct for women in the U.S. (and whether they’re actually software engineers), you can see that we have a long way to go.

Is it a pipeline problem?

So, are there just not enough qualified women in the hiring pool? It turns out that we’re actually hiring women at pretty much the same rate that women are graduating with CS degrees from four-year universities — out of the 71,420 students who graduated with a CS degree in 2017, 13,654, or ~20%, were women.6 So maybe we just need more women to get CS degrees?

Top tech companies and their non-profit arms have been using their diversity and inclusion budgets to bolster education initiatives, in the hopes that this will help them improve gender diversity in hiring. Diversity initiatives started taking off in earnest in 2014, and in 4 years, enrollment in CS programs grew by about 60%. It’s not anywhere near enough to get to gender parity.

And even if we could meaningfully increase the number of women enrolling in CS programs overall, top companies have historically tended to favor candidates from elite universities (based on some targeted LinkedIn Recruiter searches, 60% of software engineers at FAANG hold a degree from a top 20 school). You can see enrollment rates of women in 3 representative top computer science programs below. Note that while the numbers are mostly going up, growth is linear and not very fast.

Conclusion

Regardless of whether you’re a giant or a small company, as long as hiring practices largely limits itself to top schools, the status quo will continue to be fundamentally inefficient, unmeritocratic, and elitist, and any hope of reaching gender parity will be impossible. Look, there are no easy fixes or band-aids when it comes to diversifying your workforce. Rather than continuing to look for hidden sources of women engineers (I promise, we’re not all hiding somewhere, just slightly out of reach) or trying to hire all the women from top schools, the data clearly shows that the only path forward is to improve hiring for everyone by going beyond top schools and hiring the best people for the job based on their ability, not how they look on paper.