Over the weekend, the New York Times had an article titled “What Has Driven Women out of Computer Science?” which had the following fairly dramatic chart in it:

It shows female college freshman interested in computer science at an all time low of 0.3%.

I studied computer science as an undergraduate at Harvard from 1987-90.  There are a few things that I recall that might have something to do with this trend.  At the time, there was a single female professor in the department (Meichun Hsu).  Other than the introductory course, which was taught in one of the main undergraduate science buildings, the rest of computer science was taught in a fairly remote and somewhat decrepit building (Aiken computer lab) that has since been replaced with the much nicer Gates building.  There was also the reputation of the courses not just as being hard but as being incredibly time consuming (which they were).

But I don’t think any of those things mattered compared to the critical difference:  Most of us boys had done a fair bit of playing around with computers before getting to college (in my case a lot), whereas very few girls had done the same.  That set off a bad dynamic from the very first class, where all of the TAs were guys who naturally spent more time with us boys who “got it” thus setting off a self-reenforcing system in which the boys did better, ultimately wound up becoming TAs, etc.

At home I am trying to counter this trend by exposing our daughter to programming using MIT’s awesome Scratch.  But as Susan pointed out to me the other day, I clearly spend more time doing that with the boys simply because they are a bit more eager and want to do stuff with the computer that I am more interested in.  So now I am paying extra attention not to get this cycle started at home already (not just for computer science, but for science in general).