Are nerd-phobic young girls to blame for the lack of female computer scientists?
Cate Sevilla writes… Apparently there is a huge lack of women in the computer science industry. According to the National Science Foundation, 38% of the computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in 1985 went to women, but in 2003, the figure was only at about 28%. Dr. Jan Cuny (a last name that I’m sure gets a lot of “accidental typos” in emails), is a computer scientist at the University of Oregon, and thinks that women don’t want to participate in computer science programs in college because they’re afraid of being labelled a nerd. “The nerd factor is huge,” she says. The National Center for Women and Information Technology reports that apparently when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of nerds, pocket protectors and staring at a computer screen filled with confusing computer code all day. At first I thought this claim was outrageous, and surely, surely young girls being afraid of being “nerdy” can’t be linked to this slump of female c
