<p>I know my daughter loved, loved, loved her department at Brown, although there were only 6 or so women in the 45 person class. It is just a great department with lots of research going on and tons of interaction with faculty and grad students. She worked with a young upcoming female professor on a long term research project. She was very happy with the department collaborative culture. I don’t know about life of female students at her big state U grad school because it just hasn’t come up.</p>
<p>When she was thinking of a physics major, some prof was trying to gauge her inherent aptitude and interest in how things work by asking if she tinkered with car engines as a teen. Well that is something that a lot more boys are going to have an opportunity to do. Being a child of a single mother in an urban environment, that was just not something she was going to be exposed to.</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon managed to radically even out the gender imbalance when they started looking at different criteria to admit girls to CS because they recognized that they may not have the obvious backgrounds to demonstrate aptitude as boys did.</p>
<p>Apologies in advance for any stereotype offenses.</p>
<p>I think women come to CS by a circuitous route compared to men. They often don’t have anything to do with gaming or coding or hacking pre-college like a lot of men do, and don’t necessarily come from a geek culture, so it just doesn’t occur to them. And the stereotypes of dorks holed up in Mom’s basement doesn’t help. Mine had virtually nothing to do with computers aside from a short lived simple website she made in jr. high. What she did have is strong aptitude in math and exposure to science research in high school. I think if more girls had that early exposure you’d get more girls in STEM.</p>
<p>There are also discussion and evidence about how girls outperform boys in high school and if they are good in math, science and English they just may be more interested in English and history. There are discussions about that somewhere here.</p>