One woman's view of life as a member of an endangered species :-

The female Computer Science undergraduate.

When I decided on Computer Science as my chosen degree discipline, it went without saying that I'd be entering a course where men far, far outnumbered women. Having spent the previous seven years in an all girl school this wasn't an entirely unappealing prospect. It has to be said images of spending four years in lecture halls surrounded by pale, photophobic potbellied stick men who mumbled out of the side of their mouths while staring at their shoes on the rare occasions they spoke did creep into my mind now and again but being an open minded modern woman, I dismissed these as myth….. because I'd spent seven years in an all girl school and had my own ideas about the sort of men that I wanted to spend four university years with.

Now, this isn't to say the male female ratio on computing courses was my primary reason for choosing one. Let's just call it a happy coincidence. The reality of the situation is that although information technology is becoming a more "acceptable" industry for women to work in, the number of women entering higher education to study computer related disciplines is declining steadily and has been since the early 1980s. Hold tight, here comes the statistical bit but I'll make it brief. Even though the number of students commencing computing courses each year continues to grow, the number of female entries is falling. In the late 1970s, a quarter of all computing degrees in the UK were awarded to women where as these days only around 12-15% go to females. I should point out that the actual numbers of female computing graduates per year is declining, not just the percentage.

I walked into my very first computer science lecture fully expecting to be in the minority but I never anticipated just how much in the minority I was actually going to be. I believe that at the beginning of my first year, around 15 of 150 or so undergraduates on the straight computer science degree were female. That was a little intimidating to say the least but at least there weren't too many pale, photophobic potbellied stick men about. Now, half way through the second year I struggle to think of 5 other girls who've made it this far on the CS (computer science) course. The rest just faded away throughout the first year including one young, exceedingly tall, blonde and shapely girl from Sweden whose disappearance was mourned by the lads for months afterwards. Of course many of the guys also left, I just happened to notice the female proportion dropping most obviously.

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