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Interviewed by a reporter from the Springfield (MA) Union-News, Professor of Computer Science, Valerie B. Barr, reports that the percentage of women earing US computer science degrees has dropped alarmingly. In 1984 (when large numbers of CS degrees first started being awarded) women earned 37% of all degrees. That number had dropped to 28% by 1994. However, by 1998 only 16% of those earning CS degrees were women. This is particularly disturbing because without a CS degree it is now almost impossible to break into paid programming. Having watched my own daughter go through a supposedly liberal high school where girls were discouraged at every stage from taking advanced mathematics classes, and where she ended up as only one of 2 girls in her high school Sr. honors calculus class, I am not surprised at this statistic. CS curricula are unnecessarily heaviy in higher math and courses like Electrical Engineering which are arguably irrelevant to the work that programmers do but which form a formidable obstacle to college age women who would like to become programmers. As long as teenaged girls receive poor educations in math, and little support to encourage them to take difficult math courses, this will be true, even though my own experience and that of the many women who excelled as programmers and software developers a generation ago suggest that it is verbal, logical, and analytic skills as much as mathematical skills that make for success in software design. It is particularly ironic to me that EE and Calculus remain the "flunk 'em out" course for CS in today's world where few if any programmers ever code at a machine language or Assembly level. I made a career as a very successful assembler language programmer without completeing either college calculus or Electrical engineering. Today's programmers, working in object oriented languages need far less understanding of the underlying machine architecture than we did when we wrote channel program code and direct writes to 3270 screen buffers. Contributed by Janet Ruhl |