Fewer women select computer science field On the first day of a course she was teaching on computer language translators, Karen A. Lemone stood up before a sea of male faces.

There were 80 students in her class, but not one woman.

Lemone, an associate professor of computer science who has taught at WPI for 19 years, was dismayed but not surprised.

Her profession -- her passion, really -- is one that fires up the spirits and sinews of increasingly fewer women. Only 6 percent of WPI's 466 computer science students are women, yet the subject has supplanted electrical engineering as the school's second most popular major.

After reaching a peak in 1985, the number and percentage of women earning bachelor degrees in computer science has steadily declined, even as the number and percentage of women awarded degrees in similar disciplines such as math, physics, engineering, and biology have increased.

That troubles Lemone and her colleagues.

"Girls do not see this as something they want to do," she said.

Why they don't is the subject of conjecture and anecdote. But to figure out remedies, reasons must be known. Last week, the largest and oldest international association of computer professionals, the Association for Computing Machinery, announced plans to study the shrinking pipeline for women in computer science. The year-long project will be funded by a National Science Foundation grant, and the results posted on the Internet.

The number of bachelor degrees awarded in computer science has been dropping overall, for men and women, but the pace of decline has been more rapid among women. In the 1985-1986 academic year, a peak of 41,889 bachelor of arts and bachelor of science degrees were awarded in computer science; 36 percent went to women. But by 1993-94, the number of degrees fell to 24,200, with only 28.4 percent awarded to women. Yet at the same time, women accounted for 54.5 percent of degrees awarded in all disciplines.

In her 1997 study, "The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline," ACM member Tracy Camp notes that while the numbers of women earning master's and doctoral degrees in computer science increased over the same period, the fewer numbers of women at the bachelor level suggest the gains of the past, both at higher academic levels and in the job market, will be short-lived.

At the same time that the number of computer science graduates has dropped, industry demand has exploded, creating a labor shortage that has pushed companies to lobby government for higher immigration quotas of foreign-born high-technology professionals and bid up pay.

In a field where there is virtually no surplus, demand has fueled spectacular entry-level salaries. Offers of as much as $50,000 for graduating WPI computer science majors are not unheard of, Lemone said.

Barbara Simons, president of ACM, has her own thoughts about why women aren't interested in computer science. But "that is why we are doing the study; all anybody can do is to conjecture," she said.

"I have my own personal theories and others share these beliefs, but it isn't something that's been examined rigorously."

Simons and Lemone think that whatever happens to discourage women from computer science probably begins at a young age when kids turn on or off through informal activities to what could become their future livelihoods. "Shoot 'em up" computer games that are mostly aimed at boys, and before that, computer arcades, may be a contributing factor, Simons said.

Akin to games is "hacking," the fooling around with computers that Lemone said encourages entry into a field that later measures success in terms of a different set of skills -- theoretical and abstract thinking.

"It is well known that the entry level into computer science is hacking around," she said. "But women don't hack."

That Lemone stuck by her love of computer science -- in those early days there was no such major -- and rode it into the years that rewarded her greater interest in theory and abstraction may partly derive from her own comfort with hacking. "I was a little bit of a hacker, more than those who didn't stick around in the field, though never as much of a hacker as my male counterparts," she said.

Today, the computer programs Lemone writes allow students to use her Web site for distance learning, chatting with other students, taking quizzes and even office hours without the office.

While the explosion in the use of the Internet is expected eventually to bump up overall interest in computer science, Lemone and Simons say that it can be a struggle for women to get beyond the unsavory aspects of Internet use. "Pornography scares away women, or the parents of girls, anyway," said Simons. "There is certainly a lot of pornography on the Net, but there's a lot of good stuff on the Net, too. I believe that as women become more present on Net, there will be more things for women because women will make them."

Lemone simply advises, "Work around the stuff and ignore it."

There are other issues that may make women feel, "It's not worth it." Few women hold positions of power in the computing field, said Simons. "As fields become more prestigious and high status, which computing has become, there is a tendency to push women out ... it is not conscious or formal," she said, but it happens.

Professional travails in the industry spill out on a Web site forum for computing women called Systers. Discussion on the site suggests the problems women computer professionals can have in a heavily male-dominated field, problems others have described as sexual harassment, unequal pay and feelings of not being taken seriously.

Images of programmers and scientists as people socially isolated from others and in worlds of their own may also be discouraging.

But dancing around the notion of "nerds," or cultural stereotypes, Lemone wonders whether some common aspects of personality that may be less prevalent in women could also be at work.

As she struggles to find the word that best describes "not being influenced by what we should be doing," Lemone describes her academic colleagues in computer science as having "the same personalities.

"We dress lousy. We absolutely don't care how we appear to others. You never find us making a decision based on how it would appear. We find the same things funny ... and we are really comfortable being with people others may perceive as boring or uninteresting."

But she avers there ought to be room in the discipline for other personality types "and we should make space for them."

Whether it be some aversion to machines, fear of math, desire to use computers as tools rather than ends in themselves, or just plain good fashion sense that scares women away, changing the equation may simply take that determination. When schools have decided to attract more women students in traditionally male professions -- engineering, for example -- and backed up their mission with well-conceived support systems and recruiting efforts that reach into younger communities, they have been successful.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., for example, has increased the number of women engineering students from 16 percent of enrollment in 1990 to 22 percent in 1998, said spokeswoman Sheila Nason. WPI engaged in a similar effort, boosting enrollment of women from 17.8 percent to about 22 percent over the past decade.

To support the effort at Rensselaer, the assistant dean of engineering, Vicki Lynn, has developed and managed programs to recruit women and help them succeed, said Nason. The efforts include outreach to high schools, scholarships, mentoring and networking events.

Rensselaer now aims to boost the number of women in computer science -- now only 6.5 percent of enrollment and about 10 percent of enrollment in the related electrical computer and systems engineering. One of the ways is through a new Information Technology degree program with nearly 13 percent female enrollment that combines a technical core of study with a second discipline, such as architecture, economics, law or the arts, among others, said Nason.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, women represent 20 percent of computer science and electrical engineering/ computer science majors, said spokesman Robert J. Sales. "We have made it a point to recruit women."

Failure to work toward more equal representation of women in computing will only reinforce the stereotypes now in place. "If one feels as I do that we should have an egalitarian society, then you really don't want a world divided into men's and women's jobs, especially when there is no reason ... that they should be," Simons said. "There is nothing about computing that makes it more conducive to men than women."

But the more a field is dominated by men, she said, "the more it will be directed at issues and topics and ways of doing things that are appealing to men, and so it becomes self-fulfilling."

©1998 Worcester Telegram & Gazette