What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?

I don't know about Alex, and obviously my feelings don't necessarily translate to how the few females in our class felt, but I don't feel like our CS program was inherently a boys club.

Obviously your interests from childhood can influence what you want to become, but people also make decisions about what they want to be based on things that take place later in life. If a girl is never interested in computers because Halo and Counterstrike make that kind of stuff "boys things," and as an adult she lets her 10 year old opinion stand-pat, then chances are she was never really going to be all that interested in CS.

Here's the other things no one is talking about, both of which bode well for the ladies.

1) Maybe women don't have to go into "male" jobs they aren't as interested in because the traditionally female jobs they'd rather do have started to pay better. Either closing the gap between what they make compared to their male counterparts, or exceeding what they would make at the other job.

2) Maybe the female CS boom of 20 years ago was due to the fact that it was new and thus one of the "male" jobs you could be taken seriously in. Now that those barriers are coming down maybe that female that wanted to be a chemist doesn't have to "settle" for CS.
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