Women in CS: where have all the geek girls gone?

(source: American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center) (pdf)

There is a bulletin board that hangs on the lobby wall of the Physics building I work in. Amidst the job postings and conference posters and other standard university bulletin board components, there is a single graph that never fails to catch my attention. It’s not the best graph; the percentage axis is confusing and the data is a few years old, but I am aware of the real trends it is trying to represent. I believe the information is meant to be heartening. Except I’m on the red line, the only one that has been consistently declining for nearly as long as I have been alive, and I would rather have more women to work with than a career of affirmative action.

The declining numbers of women in my field of Computer Science has been a known issue that educators, industry members, and concerned geeks like the community of linuxchix have been trying to sort out since the early 1990s. The only Women’s Studies course I ever stomached in my loathing of second-wave feminism focused on “Women in Information Technology” and I was the only IT major in the class. I did a few months of library research and conducted interviews of all the female students I could find who had stuck with Computer Science or Information Systems degrees or dropped from them. I wrote a fifteen-page paper about the issues I found, mostly the same issues anyone discusses regarding women in science — confrontational and condescending attitudes from certain men in the field, self-doubt or social fallout from being assertive, actual or perceived ineptitudes at math self-traced back to early school expectations, unappealing perceptions of “geeky” people, and so on and so on. I finished my degree resigned at being one of two female students in all of my population-forty upper-level classes save Database Design (no math), and stepped out into the working world with no more of a clue than I had when I’d been made fun of at age twelve for being a geek and a tomboy.

The poster taunts me and my firsthand knowledge that its three-year-old data is still valid. All of the other sciences are improving. Where are we going wrong?