Only a small percentage of computer scientists and computer professionals are female. In the most recent years for which statistics are available, women received a third of the bachelor's degrees in computer science, 27% of master's degrees, and 13% of PhDs. Not only do women make up just 7.8% of computer science and computer engineering faculties, only 2.7% of tenured professors are female [Frenkel 1990, page 38,] [Gries et al 1991]. Even worse, these numbers seem to be improving only very slowly or even dropping [Leveson 1989, page 3,]. Many girls are still steered away from math and science or choose not to pursue careers in these fields. Additionally, many women who go into computer science are conscious of being treated differently from men or feel that they face additional barriers. This report describes some of these barriers.
As someone who has loved math and computers ever since I was a little girl, I have always found it strange that so few females share these interests. At the computer camp I attended, the boy-girl ratio was six to one. It was similar at high school math club and the math summer program I attended. At MIT, only about 20% of the computer science undergraduates are female, while other departments, such as biology, are at least 50% female. I researched this report to explore why females so consistently stay away from computer science, why people of both sexes seem to expect less from women, and why a woman is considered unfeminine if she is an engineer. Because math and computer programming came easily to me and to many other women who have had the opportunities, women clearly are not inherently unable to do well in them. Instead, girls and women are choosing, consciously or subconsciously, not to go into or stay in computer science. While one cannot rule out the possibility of some innate neurological or psychological differences that would make women less (or more) likely to excel in computer science, I found that the cultural biases against women's pursuing such careers are so large that, even if inherent differences exist, they would not explain the entire gap. In this paper, I describe the biases that women face in pursuing careers in computer science and how they deal with them.