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Study finds girls are turned off by computers CMU is working hard to buck the trend Tuesday, April 11, 2000 By Carmen J. Lee, Post-Gazette Education Writer
Bernardine Dias vividly remembers what it was like being the only female computer science major in her undergraduate class.
She recalls the abrupt change in atmosphere and conversation when she walked into a classroom or computer lab at Hamilton College in New York.
Then there were the half-joking comments from her male classmates about her intruding on their fun.
She was spared remarks about her competence, however. "I was one of the better students, so I never got the comments about women not being able to do it because that obviously wasn't the case," said Dias, 25, now a second-year graduate student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
"But you feel lonely because you don't have any [female] peers to talk to."
The situation is different at Carnegie Mellon, where 37 percent of this year's freshmen computer science majors are women.
University officials attribute the difference to the effort Carnegie Mellon has made in recent years to help high school computer science teachers find ways to get more girls into their classrooms.
"It's not going to happen until people actually start doing something," said Lenore Blum, a Carnegie Mellon distinguished service professor of computer science.
That's also the conclusion of a two-year study released today by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.
The study, "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age," found that girls avoid high-tech careers not because they don't believe they can do the work but because they believe it's boring and anti-social.
"They're not phobic about computer technology but disenchanted by it," said Pamela Haag, research director for the AAUW Education Foundation. "What they are saying to us is: 'We can do this, but we don't want to."'
The report recommends a variety of improvements in everything from computer games to teacher training to attract more women to high-tech fields.
The study involved work by a predominantly female commission of 15 researchers, educators, journalists and entrepreneurs. It also included a survey of 900 teachers, a focus group of 70 girls and reviews of existing studies.
"Tech-Savvy" elaborates on a report the AAUW foundation released two years ago about gaps in achievement between girls and boys in math, science and technology.
In the 1998 report, the foundation found that while girls were closing in on boys in math and science performance, wide disparities existed in technology use.
Students write better with computers than with pencils, study finds
Not much has changed, according to the new report, which found that women receive less than 28 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees. Computer science is the only major in which women's participation has decreased over the years -- in 1984, 37 percent of the degrees went to women.
Women make up just 9 percent of college graduates receiving engineering-related bachelor's degrees. Only 20 percent of high-tech jobs are held by women, according to the report.
Girls represent 17 percent of the high school students taking Advanced Placement computer science tests.
Haag attributes the underrepresentation to a combination of factors, including the persistent "computer geek" stereotype that many girls want to steer clear of and a lack of high-profile female role models.
"Their term was that they want to see a female Bill Gates," she said.
Girls are turned off by the violent computer games that have helped stimulate boys' interest in computers and computer games, Haag said. They also find programming classes tedious and dull.
The report recommends making computer games that involve strategy and working out real-life problems, characteristics that appeal to girls as well as boys.
Other recommendations for attracting girls into high-tech careers include beefing up teacher training in technology and revising computer science courses to make them more interesting.
Integrating more computer use into other subjects that attract girls, such as science, history or music, also might stimulate their interest in technology, Haag said.
Another suggestion was to make computers more available in homes and create family rather than individual activities around them.
The report also recommended promoting high-tech careers by showing successful women in them rather than allowing the stereotype of the dull and all-male technology workplace to continue.
Carnegie Mellon recently completed a three-year summer program funded by the National Science Foundation that enabled professors to show high school computer science teachers how to better use technology in their classrooms and think of creative ways to attract more girls to their courses.
Blum believes the program has enabled Carnegie Mellon to begin to combat the national trend, with female freshman computer science majors increasing from 7 percent in 1995 to 37 percent this school year.
She expects the percentage to grow in the next few years as more girls complete computer science courses in high school.
And once they get to Carnegie Mellon, they can participate in the Women@SCS -- Women at the School of Computer Science -- group, which provides big-sister mentors and regular support meetings and activities to encourage them to stick with computer science, engineering or other computer-related fields.
"We're really seeing changes because of the high school teachers," Blum said.
"The concrete intervention, technical instruction and incorporation of the gender issues [in the Carnegie Mellon program] had an impact."
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