Where have all the Girl Geeks gone?

One of the memestreams coming out of yesterday's Future of Mobile conference was the lack of women presenting. We've remarked on this issue before in the Netspace, noting that considering how 50%+ of New Media users are women, its odd that so few on the supply side are.

The odd thing is this is getting worse, not better, according to an article in the NYT. Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. That was in 1991. She then re-looked at it recently and found:

Computer science has changed considerably since then. Now, there are even fewer women entering the field. Why this is so remains a matter of dispute.

What’s particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.

When one looks at computer science in particular, however, the proportion of women has been falling. In 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004-5, the number had declined to only 22 percent. Data collected by the Computing Research Association showed even fewer women at research universities like M.I.T.: women accounted for only 12 percent of undergraduate degrees in computer science and engineering in the United States and Canada granted in 2006-7 by Ph.D.-granting institutions, down from 19 percent in 2001-2. Many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates.

Why? Theses include (i) the rise of computer gaming and its strong male ethos, and/or (ii) the celebration of the "True Geek" cultre turns off many women who otherwise enjoy technology, and they pursue other engineering fields (women are roughly 50% of all graduates across the science / engineering space in the US now as they note above, so it ain't ability or bottle).

A worry is that women are now more comfortable in the less macho but lower paid areas like Website design. (An aside - I have noticed that the ratio of women to men in the Social Media space is far higher, if London is anything to go by at any rate - but they do seem to be concentrated in the PR rather than Tech/Operations end).