Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at MIT, wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of 6:1. And why were only 20% of the computer science undergraduate at MIT female? She published a 124-page paper
Why are there so few Female Computer scientists?, that cataloged different cultural biases that discouraged girls from pursuing a career in the field, The year was 1991.
Computer Science has changed considerably since then.Now, there are even fewer women entering the field.Why this is so remains a matter of dispute.
What particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields.Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit.
When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51% in 2004-5 from 39% in 1984-85, according to surveys. When one looks at computer science , the proportion of women has has been falling.In 2001-2, only 28% of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004-5 , the number declined to only 22%.
Jonathan Kane, a professor of computer science at the University Of Wisconsin-Whitewater, recalls the middle 1980's , when women made upto 40% of students who majored in management computer systems.
But soon after, the number of students majoring in the program had fallen about 75%, and the number of women fell even more."I asked at department meeting," His theory is that young women earlier had felt comfortable pursuing the major because the male sub-culture of action gaming had yet to appear.
Justine Cassell , director of Northwestern University's Center for technology & Social behavior , has written about the efforts in the 1990's to create computer games that would appeal to girls and, ultimately ,increase the representation of women.
Ms Cassell has now written on the failures of these efforts , "The girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers are 'boys toys' and that true girls didn't play with computers".
She identifies another explanaton , which is linked to the pejorative figure of the "nerd". She said that this school of thought was: "Girls and young women don't want to be that person".
-NYT
