Women in computer science are like “canaries in a coal mine” according to Lenore Blum, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her remarks, made in a talk at Harvard University and reported in The New York Times (17 April), were highlighting the fact that the number of women graduating in computer science in the United States is falling. Figures from the National Science Foundation say that 38% of computer-science graduates were women in 1985, but in 2003 women accounted for only 28%. Blum believes that this tailing off is the beginning of something more serious — she fears that the factors encouraging women to quit the field will soon be leading their male counterparts away too.
Some of those factors are actually misconceptions about the state of the job market. It is commonly thought that the dotcom bust and the trend for outsourcing information-technology jobs to cheaper labour markets in countries such as India, are restricting opportunities. But, in fact, government reports and industry experts expect demand for computer scientists to increase. Nevertheless, the decline in the number of women active in the field is worrying — and seems to stretch beyond academia. A Correspondence to Nature last year pointed out that none of the 41 authors of Towards 2020 Science — a report from Microsoft that examined how to integrate computing into the sciences — was female (M. E. Pollack Nature 441, 25; 2006).
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