By Becca Gillis

Do You Look Like a Computer Scientist?

For all the social progress of the twenty-first century, a pervasive image of the computer scientist persists. He’s in Silicon Valley–style fiction, he’s the first (and second and third) iteration of “programmer” generated by AI art programs, he’s who we picture behind the keyboard—and, yes, he’s still a “he.”

Of course, perceptions of the computer scientist, Web developer, programmer, hacker, insert-your-technologist-term-of-choice have shifted over the past few decades; the ’80s movie trope of a hapless, hopeless, bespectacled nerd has transformed into something much more traditionally white collar, even hip, as the field has grown in size and prominence. But while the clothes have changed, the person we picture continues to be a man (often, a white one), because it usually still is—but this outcome was not preordained.

It’s no secret that men, particularly white men with middle- or upper-class backgrounds, have historically dominated high-paying and high-profile jobs: doctor, engineer, CEO. Legal advancements like the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 provided women and people of color greater legal ground on which to fight their way into these careers, although they still struggle to reach true parity. But in the field of computer science, that’s not how the story goes.

“You have to understand that, back then, nobody knew how to program,” says Carla Brodley ’81, P’16, Dean of Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University, explaining her introduction to computer science as an undergraduate. “It was 1982, and most people didn’t have computer science in their high schools. So when I took the first class…I felt fine.” At that point, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reports, 34.8 percent of students graduating from U.S. institutions with a degree in computer science identified as women.

Rebecca Wright ’84, Professor of Computer Science, Director of Computer Science, and Director of the Vagelos Computational Science Center at Barnard College, had her own reasons for initially feeling welcomed into the field of computer science, as the daughter of a computer programmer. “Over the years, I understood and realized that it was very formative, the fact that my mother and many of her friends were women that had gone to MIT and were working in technical or scientific fields,” she says. “From the beginning, it was normalized.” But such normalization faded quickly. “When I went to graduate school in 1988,” Carla recalls, “out of our incoming Ph.D. class of around forty-five to fifty, there were only three people who identified as women.”

What Happened, and Why Does It Matter?

So how did computer science go from an up-and-coming field comprising close to 40 percent women to something that looks much more like a boys’ club? There’s no one simple answer. According to NCES, the number of women graduating from U.S. institutions with computing degrees peaked in 1984 at 37.1 percent, having risen steadily from 13.6 percent in 1970. By 1985, however, this promising trend began to reverse, with numbers resting between 27–30 percent throughout the 1990s and plummeting to 17.6 percent by 2011, the lowest percentage of women graduating with computing degrees since 1974.

Reporting in 2014, NPR connected the beginning of this decline to the rise of home computer companies, like Apple, focusing their marketing efforts on boys and men, which might have contributed to shifting cultural attitudes that persist today. “[These attitudes are in] portrayals on TV and in movies,” says Rebecca. “There are still cultural assumptions that certain kinds of careers or subjects are better for boys or for girls, and there is a pervasiveness to that.” It’s not confined to university computer science programs, either; a 2024 Forbes Advisory report found that in coding bootcamps, an alternative to traditional degree programs popular among
professionals looking to shift careers or improve their skills, just over 30 percent of students identify as women—higher than the number of women majoring in computer science at universities but still far from gender parity.

Whatever factors led to the decline in women studying computer science, both Carla and Rebecca argue that the persistent gender gap can be traced to high schools and how students are prepared (or not) for computer science classes at the undergraduate level.

“There’s still a big disparity in high schools,” Rebecca explains. “You’re more likely to see students get to the end of high school with computing experience if they’re in a more affluent area. And then even in those schools, those classes are often not required, and the guidance counselors might be more likely to point the boys to them than the girls.”

Carla is also quick to emphasize the impact of missing out on computer-science classes at the high-school level—and how making those classes electives is not doing girls any favors. “Not everyone is getting an equitable opportunity to try computer science,” she says. “If you walk into a classroom to take Japanese or French, and everybody already speaks Japanese or French, it’s not an equitable start for you, and that’s what it feels like to start in a computer-science class if you have no prior experience.”

The resulting gender disparity in computer science leads to more than just a few skewed graphs. The field faces concerns about workforce shortages, particularly mid-level programmers, which Rebecca says will not be remedied “if we’re systematically leaving out half the population.” And, like many other industries, computer science is also grappling with the same basic issues stemming from a lack of diversity: a dearth of perspective, missed opportunities for reaching and serving a wider range of communities, and less innovation overall.

But perhaps most significant are the larger socioeconomic implications of women’s presence, or lack thereof, in a remunerative field. While tech may no longer be a guaranteed golden ticket to a cushy job, it remains one of the most lucrative careers you can have coming out as an undergrad, Carla stresses. “You can make six figures [as a computer scientist] in Boston, and I think that wealth needs to be distributed to everybody. That’s the number-one reason why I care so much about this. You can make enough as a twenty-two-year-old that you can pull a whole family out of poverty. I think that anything that puts up artificial barriers toward some people being able to do lucrative careers is wrong—and the barriers are artificial.”

Roads to Progress

The Center for Inclusive Computing

Carla discovered an opportunity to break down those barriers at a national level when she received a phone call from Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates company. The organization had noticed Carla’s work in creating a beginner-friendly and inclusive computer-science program at Northeastern University, and they hoped to expand her vision to computer-science programs across the country. With Pivotal Ventures’s support and funding, Carla became the Founding Executive Director of the Center for Inclusive Computing, a Northeastern-based initiative that works with universities across the United States to tackle barriers that prevent women from discovering and pursuing computer science.

“We do systemic, sustainable changes that make it so everybody can have an equitable start to computer science, regardless of prior experience. And because prior experience is not uniformly distributed with respect to demographics, this has the result of broadening participation in computing. So we do things like make it so that true beginners feel comfortable in the intro sequence, not by making it easier, but by doing the things that support them,” she explains. “We work inside the system to make changes to the way in which computer science is actually offered, as opposed to providing enrichment things or help from the outside.”

Some of those changes are happening inside the classroom, such as training teaching assistants how to better support beginner students, mitigating the trend of new (and often female) students exiting the computer-science program due to feeling unwelcome or like they are too far behind to make meaningful progress. In the early- to mid-2010s, the computer science program at Northeastern, Carla’s own institution, was struggling with a 25 percent rate of students dropping, withdrawing from, or failing the first course (CS1) in the computer science major. Half of all women who tried CS1 left the program. After implementing more culturally appropriate training for teaching assistants, as well as splitting introductory computer science classes into standard and accelerated sections (using the same material and assessments), the program not only saw the dropout rate fall to below 5 percent, but also saw that rate become evenly distributed across demographics.

Other initiatives focus on more administrative issues, such as limiting prerequisite chains that force students to enter college as a computer science major in order to graduate on time, leaving little to no room for discovering the subject during a student’s first few semesters—which can be a vital gateway for those students who missed out on high-school computer-science classes.

Forming Community at Rutgers and Barnard

“I’ve been fortunate in being welcomed into computing pretty much every step of the way,” Rebecca says. “I know that is not everyone’s experience. But I think a big turning point for me was when I made this shift or realization that I wanted to more actively take a role in helping to promote diversity and wider participation in computer science and computing more broadly.”

Rebecca got the chance to do just that while teaching at Rutgers University, where she developed a living-learning community for undergraduate women in computer science. The Computer Science Living-Learning Community program, for which Rebecca also served as faculty director, provides students with faculty and graduate-student mentorship as well as a community of first-year women with a shared passion for computing who live and take a class together. “We ended up doing some research on the program as we were developing it,” Rebecca says, “and our qualitative work found that a majority of the students didn’t feel they would have persisted if they hadn’t had that community to draw on.”

Rebecca’s work with the living-learning community at Rutgers helped propel her to her current position at Barnard, a women’s college where she has been instrumental in developing a robust and inclusive computer-science program. A key component has been the development of an Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science course, which allows students to learn some basic computing and data analysis without fully committing to a computer-science major. In addition to providing a learning opportunity for non-majors, the class “can also serve as a pre-intro class for students that are interested in majoring in computer science but don’t feel ready to take CS1,” Rebecca says. “Even though that class doesn’t explicitly require any background [in computer science], a student who really, truly doesn’t have that background often doesn’t feel ready.” Thanks to this class for true beginners, a wider variety of students have considered computer science as a viable career option.

Remaking the Image

Today, the percentage of computer science majors in the United States who identify as women sits around 21.5 percent, inching forward from about 18 percent ten years ago but still not matching levels from the 1980s or even mid-1990s. Some barriers to growing those numbers have been harder to knock down than others, including university policies like GPA-based enrollment caps. “That’s where they say, ‘Hey, everyone can try computer science, but only those of you that can get a grade higher than this can major,’” Carla says. “If a school’s decided to have that as a barrier, nothing we can do can fix it.” It’s hard to measure the impact of cultural mores, too, if women in computer science feel socially isolated or singled out in predominantly male classrooms or workplaces.

In the face of such lingering hurdles, where do we go next? Rebecca’s work highlights the importance of focusing on the ubiquity of computing in the modern world and utilizing that to broaden the subject’s appeal and attract more students. “Computing technology is used across really every discipline, as well as our everyday lives; I think that’s the biggest change I’ve seen in my time in computing,” she says. “It gives many more opportunities to connect with people.”

In an effort to appeal to a wider variety of students, many of Barnard’s computer-science classes address various societal challenges and how technology can either alleviate or exacerbate those issues, adding a social justice lens to classes that once were entirely technical. Barnard’s computer-science department has also made a point to connect computer science to its various creative uses, helping students recognize the potential of applying computing to the arts or to creative projects. “Things like that are happening more broadly, partly as a way to attract a more diverse population and retain them in the computing workforce and partly because of a realization that that’s actually how we need to be thinking about computing,” Rebecca says. “You can’t think about building these technologies in a vacuum.”

You can make enough as a twenty-two year-old [computer scientist] that you can pull a whole family out of poverty. I think that anything that puts up artificial barriers toward some people being able to do lucrative careers is wrong—and the barriers are artificial.”

To ensure female students are actually enrolling in undergraduate computer-science classes, however, Carla believes that the single most impactful step we can take is to make these classes mandatory at the high-school level. “I mean, chemistry, physics, and biology are required, and I’m not going to say anything negative about those three fields, but if you think about it, the vast majority of people are never going to use their chemistry, their physics, or their biology—but they are going to use a computer,” she says.

Carla witnessed the effects of mandating high-school computer science firsthand while working with the Community Charter School of Cambridge, which made the decision to require an introductory computer-science class for tenth-grade students. Following that change, Carla recalls, their AP Computer Science elective had thirty students in it last year—eighteen of whom identified as women. “That wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t make that first class, the explorations class, required for everybody so that people could discover for themselves whether they thought it was interesting,” she says.

High schools, then, have a starring role to play in how the story of computer science unfolds from here, as the point at which students receive—or fail to receive—that vital introduction to the subject, and perhaps where they form or break down that image of who a computer scientist is.

Commonwealth’s computer-science curriculum has evolved in recent years to address these demographic disparities and become more inclusive of true beginner students through the introduction of the Computer Programming Essentials course, designed for students with no prior experience in computer science. “A big part of my philosophy of teaching computer science is that the first time around might not stick, the second time around might not stick,” says Commonwealth computer science teacher David Gold. “But if you can have an experience where you see yourself as a computer scientist, then the next time around it’s more likely to stick…thinking, ‘Oh, I’m a computer scientist.’”

Maya Venkatraman ’17, who studied computer science during two of her years at Commonwealth, notes the advantages of the school’s small size in creating a more equitable classroom environment for students of computer science. “I have taken classes at [college] that are hundreds of people, and you’ll be one of three women. That's a very shocking ratio,” she says. “Whereas when it’s five people and the teacher knows you individually and is able to help you individually, I really don’t think you feel the lack of equity in the field as strongly.”

It seems largely inevitable, at least for the time being, that women pursuing computer science will encounter classrooms and workplaces with warped gender ratios favoring the same male computer scientists they’ve been conditioned to expect. But if they get the opportunity to see themselves as computer scientists before stepping into those rooms, they just might feel more comfortable in those spaces—and, hopefully, pave the way for a much more representative field. “You might realize, ‘Oh, there’s not that many of us women,’” Rebecca says. “But personally, if I was having trouble with a computer science class, I wasn’t like, ‘Well, women don’t belong here.’ I knew that wasn’t true, because I had had these examples. I didn’t have a sense of, ‘I don’t belong here,’ because it was too late for me to.”

Becca Gillis is the Communications Coordinator at Commonwealth School. This article originally appeared in the summer 2024 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.

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