As a hiring manager - I'll say "equally" in this case is a word that bears little meaning. Every candidate is different, and I'm looking for the candidate that is best. Your degree isn't equal to a CS degree, and it's the job of the company's hiring process to hone the set of candidates so that most time is spend evaluating the qualifications of the most promising candidates. The goal here to be promising enough that you get to a place where your value will shine.
Evaluation
To find a candidate, someone mans the front lines and looks at all potential candidates from a variety of input streams including - resumes posted via sites, resumes obtained through recruiters, referrals and people who were hunted down specifically because of their observed skills.
When the resume comes with a cover letter and very little other context, all the evaluator can do is judge whether the candidate looks to be as good as any other recent candidate. Job markets fluctuate and so what may pass in a hot market won't pass when tons of people are looking for jobs.
When a wealth of options presents itself, evaluators will select for the most perfect background they can find:
- experience in the given business domain
- experience in the given technology (solution domain)
- depth of experience
- college degree specifics
- college reputation
The longer a candidate's been in the field, the more the business/technology experience counts over school & degree. With a new college grad, the school and degree is the most significant part of their experience - it's what they were just doing with the last few years of their lives! And, of course, 30 years ago there really WAS no degree in computer science, so everyone with any skills came from a math or engineering program and got some programming experience somewhere.
For the most part, referrals from trusted people, internal transfers, and people who have been personally solicited end up in a more exclusive stack of candidates. At that point, degree type matters even less, because the person has already been proven to be good to work with or of a demonstrated skill set.
My father always said:
The degree and schools gets you in the door, the rest is up to you.
The line " a degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering or related field. " means that it is not REQUIRED that the candidate have a computer science degree - the job may be done without it. But it does not mean that a related degree is considered equally valuable.
Advice
This doesn't mean "don't apply" - it does mean, make your most relevant qualifications stand out. If you have a Chemical Engineering degree and you spent an internship writing code for a chemical engineering related project - make sure that when you apply for the software position, you highlight all the software development related work that you did, so your very relevant experience stands out.