Women shun computer science

Women are making great strides in many careers including science and engineering, but not in computer science. In 2001 and 2002, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004 and 2005, the number had declined to only 22 percent.

The Computing Research Association has reported that women at research universities accounted for only 12 percent of undergraduate degrees in computer science and engineering in the United States and Canada in 2006 and 2007, down from 19 percent in 2001 and 2002. Many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates. At the same time, a National Science Foundation survey shows women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical field.

What's the reason? No one knows for sure. But Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has a theory. He believes young women earlier had felt comfortable pursing the major because the male subculture 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 1990s to create computer games that would appeal to girls and help increase the representation of women in computer science.

"The girls game movement failed to dislodge the sense among both boys and girls that computers were 'boys' toys' and that true girls didn't play with computers," Cassell told the New York Times. She said some people in the field still believe that the answer to reversing declining enrollment is building the right game.

For more on this gender issue:
- see the New York Times article