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IMMEDIATE
Nearly 30 Percent Decline of women Choosing Undergraduate Degrees in Computer Science New York, June 5, 2000 ...Recent White House findings showed employment in the information technology (IT) industry grew 81 percent. Women, who represent 47 percent of the work force at large, make up only 29 percent of several IT categories. Despite the demand for computing professionals outstripping the supply, more men than women are earning undergraduate, master's and doctorate degrees in computer science. The Association for Computing Machinery Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W), which three years ago surveyed the shrinking pipeline of women in computer science, has just released a new study that finds the pipeline continues to shrink. Females in high school, college, graduate schools and beyond are not choosing computer science (CS) degrees. Is it because they don't want to be nerds? Do women see the field as better for men than women? Are academia and the computing industry not reaching out to women? The new "Incredible Shrinking Pipeline Unlikely to Reverse" study from ACM-W has found that from 1983 to 1996, the percentage of women earning bachelor degrees in CS shrank from a high of 37.1 percent to a low of 27.5 percent. That is a nearly thirty percent decline. And this is while bachelor's degrees awarded to women in all disciplines have increased almost every year for decades. The disturbing trend unique to CS is that women are increasingly earning bachelor degrees in ALL sciences and engineering fields -- EXCEPT CS. The good news is that after several years of a decrease in the number of students earning CS degrees, the number of students now earning CS degrees is on the upswing. However, the proportion of these degrees being awarded to women continues to decline. "Girls and women are not turned off by technology, but by how it is used in our society," said Denise Gurer, 3Com Corporation Technologist, and ACM-W co-chair. "We can attract more girls and women to technology areas if we make classrooms more inclusive of technology uses that interest them. That includes software games that are more engaging for girls. Women serve as a valuable resource for an influx of intelligent creative people, thus lessening the IT worker shortage. We need a diversity of people developing and designing technology." Vanessa Davies, who contributed to the ACM-W study and recently earned her BS in computer science from the Colorado School of Mines, added, "I enjoy my work with computers, which makes me different from most other females. I can still remember when I didn't do things because they were nerdy, but I also see the rewards and prestige associated with being a computer nerd." ACM-W believes the alarming decline of women's participation in CS can be reversed, and is calling on middle and senior administrators in the computing community to actively recruit more women at every phase in the pipeline -- K-12, undergraduate, graduate, faculty and industry. The CS community needs to be aggressive in exploring options and planning changes.
The interactive ACM-W Web site (http://www.acm.org/women/) includes data, references and
ideas for closing the current gender gap. Visitors to the site are asked to answer questions on
the CS gender gap issue and submit strategies for interesting women in CS. The results from
this survey are being tabulated.
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