Klawe: Never been a better time for women to enter computer science

One of Maria Klawe's missions as president of the prestigious math, science and engineering school, Harvey Mudd College, is to boost the number of young women entering the field of computer science.

Klawe, former dean of engineering at Princeton University and past president of the Association for Computing Machinery, is on a bit of a recruiting mission, making the case that for women, the information technology job market is wide open and salaries are high.

KLAWE: The thing that makes it particularly attractive to many women is that there is now -- most of of the positions involve combining computing and some other area. So for instance, it could be anthropology, it could be medicine, it could be law, it could be entertainment, and so on.

What I've found in my career is that women are often very interested in being able to to interdisciplinary things where you mix knowledge and perspectives from one area with those from another and computer science and the ideas behind computer science, whether its algorithms or data mining or whatever, are revolutionizing virtually every field in the world.

And so it's just this amazing opportunity for people to work in a cutting edge kind of area and be able, if you love music, if you love linguistics or any of those kind of things, you can combine that with the technology that is revolutionizing those fields.

wavLength: Why is it we're still having to make this kind of appeal to young women? Why haven't we had more success getting more women into the field of computer science?

KLAWE: Computer science is really unique in that the participation by women has fallen steadily over the last 20 years whereas in every other discipline of science and engineering participation by women has risen over that time.

The research shows that the primary reasons are that the image of a computing career is one that girls don't find attractive. They think it's going to be boring, that it's not going to involve working with people. They don't see programming as something that they would want to do, and they don't like the image of people who are in computing - you know, the skinny guy with thick glasses who has no social life and they say, "That's not for me."

wavLength: I have two daughters who are good in math and science but computer science is not even on their radar screens. This is a very entrenched problem, isn't it? You just can't get most young women to consider computer science.

KLAWE: I think you're completely right, and the best idea I've had so far about turning it around is to convince (not that I've actually managed to implement this) but is to convince a number of medical schools that they should make computer science and computer science majors one of their desired subjects for students doing pre-med.

One of the areas where information technology has been applied least so far is medicine and health care. And most hospitals are now seeing that many of the advances are going to come about by having more doctors who are computer-savvy. And so I think there's going to be a growing desire for people coming into med school who have a strong background in computer science, because there's no room in the med school curriculum to introduce computer science.

Given that more than half of pre-med students are female today, and that roughly half the med school students are female, I think that would be one of our best routes to interest more young women in learning at least some computer science.

Klawe will deliver a keynote address at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing next week in Orlando.

To listen to this interview, visit Future Tense. Leave your comments here, or contact me via email, Facebook or Twitter.

Slightly off topic, but you mention Grace Hopper, and she was one of my favorite people -- I had a professional admiration for her as an old-school programmer. She was also a good communicator. She used to carry a piece of string or wire just short of one foot long. She'd hold it up and say "This is a nanosecond." It was an illustration of how far an electrical signal -- which travels at the speed of light -- would propagate down a wire in a billionth of a second. Great prop.

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