Haosen Liu

Professor Raymond Meredith

ESL 101-201
5 May 2016
What Keeps Female Out Of Computer Science
One year ago, when I walked into my first computer science
lecture, I can only find several girls among hundreds of students. I
was thinking this is a coincidence. Unfortunately, such thing keep
happening in all my computer science courses. I cant help asking
myself: is this only happen to my school? Is this also common in
other

STEM

fields(science,

technology,

engineering

and

mathematics)? A report named "Women, Minorities, and Persons

with Disabilities in Science and Engineering," from the National
Science Foundation lays out these trends nicely:

As you can see, most of other STEM fields have been successful
attracting more women in the past 2 decades. The participation of
female in psychology, bio-sciences, social science is already higher
than 50 percent in recent years. However, when we take a look at
the trends in computer science, we found that computer science is
more male-dominated today than 20 years ago. Women received
29.6 percent of computer science B.A.s in 1991, but only 18.2
percent in 2010. It seems that the gap is not only happening in my
school. And it looks like that there will be less women in the futures
computer science class. Why is this happen?
In the article What Has Driven Women Out of Computer
Science?, Randall Stross, New York Times Digital columnist, gives
us his answer to this question.