How Should We Measure Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Equity in Undergraduate CS Programs?

Promoting equity in computer science is crucial, but how best to measure equity is not entirely clear. Building on the tradition of critical quantitative inquiry, we present a test case of four different ways to measure equity in undergraduate CS programs for a given target population: the count of the population, the percent of the population in CS (as opposed to in other majors), the percent of CS students from the target population, and a metric we introduce, the proportional representation index (PRI). The PRI mitigates the impact that very large schools, very large CS programs, and regional population variation can have on the other metrics, but it also presents its own challenges. We believe that this work will contribute to the conversation regarding measuring equity by presenting and then problematizing several possible metrics.