And she won't lack female classmates after all. That's because Carnegie Mellon is about to achieve what would have seemed out of the question just a few years ago. It plans to enroll a freshman class of computer science majors that is 37 percent female, up from 8 percent in 1995. Experts say Carnegie Mellon's changing approach to how it recruits women and how it teaches them about computing could have wide implications, given its standing among computer science programs. Other elite campuses will be watching to see if the school is as good at retaining those women as it has been in attracting them.
Experts say the shortage of women in computing is more than a problem of gender equity.
It has made it harder to fill positions in some of the hottest technical fields. In programming alone, several hundred thousand jobs now go begging, according to some estimates. Women bring different perspectives that could help the discipline's evolution, and their absence means those ideas aren't being tapped, Martin and others say. More than half of U.S. college students are women and they are becoming more common in some scientific fields. But the story has been different in computer science.