Wanted: Female Computer-Science Students

Colleges work to attract and support women in technology majors

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Chart: The shrinking proportion of women in computer and information sciences

Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live discussion with Claudia Morrell, a psychologist and the executive director of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County's Center for Women and Information Technology, about how to encourage more women to pursue computer-science degrees.

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By SCOTT CARLSON

Are computer programmers from Mars? Is computer science a guy thing? Some experts are wondering just that — at least, as it is taught now. While other fields, like mathematics, science, and chemistry, have seen growing enrollment and involvement of women, the number of women in computer science and related fields remains low and stagnant. According to the Computing Research Association, only 17 percent of undergraduate computer-science degrees were awarded to women in 2004, down from 19 percent in 2000. Those dwindling numbers come at a crucial time for the discipline, which has seen shrinking enrollments in since the dot-com bust.

Could it be that men are more attracted to the nuts and bolts of computers, while women are more interested in the social and cultural applications of the devices? Perhaps computer-science programs, suggest some researchers, are stacked against women and the way they learn.

Some women who have been successful in computer science, however, say that is nonsense. What is needed, they say, is more social support for women in the discipline — and for peers and parents to stop telling girls that computers are not for them.

To provide that support, programs and clubs for women in computer science have recently cropped up at colleges across the country, notably at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

Women who want to go into computer fields can face discouragement and discrimination from as early as grade school, through college, and into the work world. Consider the story of Kim, who graduated from Ohio University in 2004. Kim, who asked to remain anonymous, arrived at the university intending to major in mass communications. But, having grown up building ham radios with her father, she thought a technical field would provide better job options and offer more of a challenge.

Communications-systems management, a technical degree with lots of programming, was definitely challenging, but not in ways she had anticipated. She was one of only a handful of women in the program. "The guys wanted to be my partner when it came to writing papers, but no one wanted to be my partner when it came to lab time," she says.

Advising sessions for the degree were held at a local bar. "All the guys would sit together, eating the hot wings," she says. "I hated going there, because I knew that unless the other girls showed up, I would be sitting by myself."

The challenges did not end when she got her first job after graduation, at AT&T, as the only woman on a team of techies charged with selling equipment and services. On her first day, a senior male colleague tossed a pencil on the floor in front of her. "Could you pick that up?" he cooed, clearly wanting to ogle her.

"I was floored," she says. "I called home that night and just cried."

Downward Trend

Studies of women in technology inevitably refer to Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, a highly influential and celebrated study of women in computer science, based on research conducted largely in the late 1990s at Carnegie Mellon. At the time of the study, only 7 percent of the computer-science majors at Carnegie Mellon were women.

Nationwide, "things have not changed that much," says Jane Margolis, a researcher at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was one of the book's authors. "In fact, they've gotten worse."

Her studies indicate that boys get more hands-on experience with computers at home. In addition, she says, games and computer software are generally designed by guys, for guys, and tend to engage boys more than girls.

In high-school and college courses, computer science is presented as straight programming, which is seen as tedious, especially by women, she says. Men are generally interested in computers as tools and objects of study, according to her research; women are more interested in what computers can do for science, the arts, or society.

"What our research found was that their motivation for learning computer science very much hung on the purpose that computing was going to be used for," she says. "It wasn't just hacking for hacking's sake. There was a real social context that gave them motivation and meaning."

In response to such findings, Carnegie Mellon changed the admissions policies for its School of Computer Science in 1999. Instead of primarily looking for students who had prior programming experience, the university broadened its criteria to include students who had ambitious goals, who showed leadership skills, and, of course, who had excellent grades. After 2000, the number of women entering the computer-science program went from below 10 percent to more than 30 percent and has held steady there since.

Lenore Blum, a professor of computer science, arrived at Carnegie Mellon just as the admissions policy changed and as the population of women in the program surged. Local newspapers were celebrating the arrival of women in the computer-science program. "I could see that unless we did something that provided the critical professional support for women in the program," Ms. Blum says, "you would see articles the following year saying that half the students had dropped out."

She wanted to set up a program that would foster the professional experiences and support for women at Carnegie Mellon that are "implicit and often not acknowledged for a majority in a population," she says.

The program, called Women@SCS, draws prominent female speakers from the world of technology who can serve as role models for the students. It runs a mentor service, in which women who are juniors and seniors can counsel freshmen and sophomores, offering support for course work or for dealing with the rigors of the major. Social occasions, like lunches, are set up to provide opportunities for the women to network.

"These are common-sense things to do, but you've got to do them," Ms. Blum says, adding that she is tired of hearing people bemoan the fact that computer science is losing female students. "What I'm realizing is that there is too much talk the talk and not enough walk the walk. We have the complete support of the president, the provost, the dean, and the chair of the department. They're not just saying, 'Hey, you're doing a good job.' They are paying the bill."

'Bias In, Bias Out'

The expanded population of women in Carnegie Mellon's computer-science program has given Ms. Blum the opportunity to do her own research on the classes of 2002 and 2004. She says her findings contradict some of the conclusions of Unlocking the Clubhouse. The book's research was tainted by "bias in, bias out," she argues, reflecting Carnegie Mellon's admissions requirements at the time, which rewarded programming experience that male students were more likely to possess.

Ms. Blum does not believe that women are oriented toward applications and that men are oriented toward programming. "We didn't see any gender differences at all, but found similar spectra in men and women," she says. "We found that there were some men who were hackers and some women who were hackers. ... One of the women we interviewed said that she kisses her computer every morning."

"To say that there are intrinsic male and female differences and you have to accommodate for those is absolutely wrong," she says. "Don't devise the curriculum so that it's female-friendly. That will only serve to marginalize women."

Other colleges have set up programs like Women@SCS. The University of Maryland-Baltimore County recently started the Center for Women and Information Technology, or CWIT, as it is more commonly known. The center supports female students in computer science, information science, computer engineering, and information studies. Women in the center's program live together on a designated floor of a residence hall, allowing for the sort of support that all-night programming sessions require. The center also helps women make connections with local companies for jobs and internships.

CWIT attempts to counter some of the negative influences that have ground down the students' self-esteem. Lindsay Mannchen, a senior, says she was one of two girls in her high-school programming courses, where her male peers told her again and again that she was no good at programming and that she was out of place.

"One of guys I grew up with and was in all of the classes with told me that, scientifically, girls were not programmed to do math like guys could," she says. "And I believed him."

Since joining the CWIT program in college, her attitude has changed, "mostly because I'm surrounded by girls who say, 'That's not right; don't listen to that,'" she says.

"I do notice that a lot of my classes are male-dominated, and in information science, we do a lot of group projects," she says. "The guys don't want to listen to the girls, unless you stand up and prove yourself right away."

The women's center is not all women. A select group of male students is involved with the program, a strategy to draw UMBC men into the conversation about women in technical fields. "It's not so much that only women can encourage us," says Amanda Schwenk, a freshman. "It's that the guys realize that it's harder for women to get a start or keep going in this, and that it's not exactly socially acceptable."

Social Factors

Claudia Morrell, executive director of CWIT, is not a computer scientist but a psychologist who has been studying the attitudes and influences of women and girls in computer science. Support programs for female computer-science majors can help women stay in the discipline, she argues, but crucial influences in childhood are strong factors in steering girls away from computer science and related fields.

"Parents are students' No. 1 source for decisions in career making," Ms. Morrell says. "Daughters tend to identify or align themselves with their mothers, and mothers aren't often the ones who are involved with technology." Meanwhile, dad is the one who is often fussing with the computer, hooking up the home stereo system, or even has a job involving technology.

When girls enter middle school, Ms. Morrell says, these perceptions begin to solidify into career goals, as young people start to form their identities. "At that age, gender issues become important as an expression of personal identity," she says. Too often, a middle-school girl who says she wants to be a computer scientist is treated much like a boy who says he wants to be a nurse — the professions carry gender identities, even if they are outdated.

Those gender identities still have power over enrollment choices. If schools offer computer-science or programming courses — and all too often they don't, scholars say — enrollment is often dominated by boys, who are already playing around with computers at home. A middle-school girl in a programming class might feel as out of place as a boy in a sewing course.

Add to all those influences the image of computer scientists and programmers well known in the media: the brilliant but socially inept mumbler who could use a few tips on hairstyles and clothes.

"Unfortunately, computer fields have a geeky image," Ms. Morrell says, "and girls in particular don't want to be perceived as geeks and nerds."

So by the time girls enter high school and start thinking about colleges and careers, computer science and related technology fields are distant thoughts compared with biology, chemistry, and mathematics, which have seen tremendous growth in women's participation in the past few decades.

Ms. Morrell and others at UMBC are trying to change that in Maryland with a couple of programs that are specifically aimed at middle-school girls. The university runs a summer program that invites girls to explore science and technology. While the girls are digging into computers, people from CWIT sit down with parents to talk about the troubles of attracting women to computer science, the subtle influences on that trend within the home, and the potential women have in the field.

The university also runs an after-school program at six suburban Baltimore middle schools, focusing on hands-on activities in science and technology. Supported by a $1-million grant from the National Science Foundation, the program covers basic tenets of science and technology, while giving students the opportunity to tear apart cameras to see how they work, to put together telephones from kits and string together a telephone network, and to create presentations on computers.

At a middle school in Essex, an economically depressed community east of Baltimore, Renee Yusuff and Anissa Nixon pore over a diagram for assembling a blue plastic telephone, barely looking up to answer a reporter's questions.

"I learned how to use a digital camera and how to use PowerPoint," Renee says when asked about her favorite lessons in the program. "I want to go into information technology." Anissa says that she is considering some kind of career in engineering.

True to Ms. Morrell's observations, the girls have had strong role models in technology within their families. Renee learned about computers from her uncle, who used to work on them in the basement at home. Anissa's mother used to climb telephone poles to repair lines for Verizon. "She was one of the only women in that job," Anissa says, then adds proudly, "and she was one of the best."

Mentors Needed

Among college women in computer science who were interviewed by The Chronicle, many recounted special circumstances from childhood that helped them enter the field and stick with it.

Amy Goodwin, a junior at Carnegie Mellon, picked up computers as early as elementary school because she had a learning disability that affected her handwriting. She dug into her laptop, a constant companion, and learned some common programming languages by sixth grade.

In programming classes in high school — at an all-girls school in Maryland, where, she says, girls "don't have to pretend not to be smart when they're around guys" — she says she knew far more than the students who enrolled from a nearby boys' school. Her mother, a law professor, was a strong figure in her life and taught her by example to persevere in a profession that is still an old-boys' club.

She considers her gender an asset — something that might make her stand out in job applications. Recruiters from Microsoft and from Google — who brought shirts with the o's in Google transformed into female symbols — came to Carnegie Mellon to talk about the opportunities for women in their companies. But she has also heard, from women who graduated from Carnegie Mellon a few years ago, stories about male colleagues who said things like "You don't belong here" and "You're only here because you're a woman."

"Those are the people that are out there in the work world," she says.

Ms. Blum and Ms. Morrell point out that their programs for women are building alumnae networks, through which women can find out about friendly workplaces and evangelize about the field. National organizations like the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, which is composed of female professionals from the computer industry and academe, provide opportunities for women in the working world to get together and support one another.

Progress may come, if slowly. There was a time, Ms. Morrell points out, when number-crunching was the dominion of women. During World War II, many women were hired as "computers," solving long lists of equations for the war effort using mechanical desk calculators that were the precursors of mainframes. Grace Murray Hopper, an early programmer, is celebrated as a pioneer in the field, having found the first computer "bug." Ada Byron Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician, is credited with writing the first computer program.

"We forget to celebrate," Ms. Morrell says, noting the progress that has been made over the years in mathematics and other sciences. "It's simply a matter of time before women see the professional opportunities and the financial opportunities. We'll reach a tipping point where women reach some level of comfort, and this will no longer be a problem."

WOMEN IN COMPUTING: A SHRINKING SHARE A report from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that the proportion of women in computer and information sciences has dwindled in the past 20 years, especially compared with other fields in mathematics and sciences. The center's statistics lump computer science with information science, which tends to have a larger percentage of women. SOURCE: U.S Department of Education