Women are under-represented in the technological fields.
In computer programming, the percentage of women is approximately 35 percent in the workplace, and 18 percent in post-secondary institutions. In middle school and high school computer classes, girls tend to be the minority. As more and more jobs require technological competence, this trend can mean a loss of income for individual women at work and a loss of a huge pool of intellectual resource for the nation. In her 1995 work, Reviving Ophelia , Mary Pipher makes the case that adolescent girls start to lose self-confidence and are not encouraged to make challenging goals to realize their potential. It is also a time when girls start to perform less well in science and math.