On this page you can find the following topics: The Debate over Gender Differences; Women & Computing Careers: Problems & Solutions; Advances for Women in Computing; Women Networking; More on Women in Computing from the CPSR Archives.

Link to the article by Wendy Faulkner
This article reports from a European study on efforts to close a gendered digital divide through inclusion. The authors argue that inclusion is not just a mirror image of exclusion, and that to achieve inclusion, it is not sufficient to curb exclusion mechanisms but to enhance positive measures of inclusion. A variety of inclusion strategies have been studied, the authors concluding that ‘one size does not fit all’. Therefore, to reach a wide audience, a combination of many different strategies is needed. More women users are not sufficient to increase women's influence on ICT development, however. Particular measures are needed to recruit more women into the ICT profession and to curb marginalization within the profession.

Link to the article by Peter McKenna
An orthodox ‘hard mastery’ programming style is a cornerstone of Sherry Turkle’s influential psychoanalysis of different approaches to learning and practice in computer programming. Hard mastery consists of planning and design, documentation, structure, functional and data abstraction, and debugging, in the development of programs. Turkle is concerned that teachers of programming are trained to recognise hard mastery as the only real way to program, whereas it is only ‘male mastery’. To bring women into computing, teachers are told to teach or facilitate the development of soft, hacking styles. This paper argues that this was a misconceived and impossible aspiration whose widespread influence has led, instead, to a deepening of perceptions of programming and computing as a masculine culture, and to the implicit and absurd identification of women as innately unsuited to the skills required for large programming projects in real organisations.

Link to the article by Mazliza Othman and Rodziah Latih
The dwindling number of women pursuing a degree in CS is a growing frustration for many countries around the globe, but in Malaysia female CS/IT students outnumber the males. What accounts for this dichotomy?

Link to the article by Danielle R. Bernstein
The University of Wisconsin (UW) Women and Science program is a four- year program aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of women and minorities in mathematics, science and engineering. Funded by an eight- semester long National Science Foundation grant (Science, Diversity and Community, 1994), the program seeks to reverse this attrition from the sciences at a point where it is most acute: the introductory courses in the undergraduate science curriculum. As the only Distinguished Visiting Professor (DVP) in computer science, I appreciated the problems common to all sciences but also understood the special demands of the computing major. This paper discusses these challenges in computing, encourages computing faculty to share these concerns with students and offers some solutions.

A group of young women college graduates involved with the ENIAC are identified. As a result of their education, intelligence, as well as their being at the right place and at the right time, these young women were able to perform important computer work. Many learned to use effectively "the machine that changed the world" to assist in solving some of the important scientific problems of the time. Ten of them report on their background and experiences. It is now appropriate that these women be given recognition for what they did as "pioneers" of the Age of Computing.

Link to the article by Jennifer S. Light
This article retells the history of ENIAC's "invention" with special focus on the female technicians whom existing computer histories have rendered invisible. In particular, it examines how the job of programmer, perceived in recent years as masculine work, originated as feminized clerical labor. The story presents an apparent paradox. It suggests that women were somehow hidden during this stage of computer history while the wartime popular press trumpeted just the opposite.

The EUCU.NET - European Children's Universities Network started as an EU funded project in 2008 and has been very successful in linking up and networking practitioners across Europe and beyond. It is now launching itself on a self financing basis, responding directly to need for a Network for practitioners and others committed to this area of work.

Robots are an ideal educational tool for a hands-on introduction to technology. By designing, constructing, programming and testing mobile robots, children learn the basic concepts of today’s technical systems. In a playful approach, they learn to handle sensors, motors, programs and a graphical software development environment. These are the main technical topics of Roberta courses. In addition, they learn that constructing technical systems is a creative process that is not easy but strengthens their self-confidence in their own technical skills.

CIWS conducts research and disseminates information on various topics relevant to women's experiences in scientific careers.