Girls continue to opt out of high-tech careers for reasons that still puzzle academics. It's a situation that also has serious implications for industries already facing shortages of high-tech workers. The number of women going into undergraduate engineering and computer science programs remains stubbornly small.
Women continue to avoid computer engineering in droves.
It's not happening. The number of women participating on the World Wide Web is growing exponentially, but there is a big difference between using computers to access information and developing the computer system itself. Some academics think girls are turned off careers in information technology because they believe they'd be spending most of their time working alone on a computer, with colleagues consisting of geeky nerds who lack social skills. We need women's perspectives in designing these technologies. High schools also don't do a good job of explaining what engineering is all about, the career possibilities in IT and the qualifications students need to get in the programs.