Computer science needs more women Computer science is still dominated by men. This must change. It’s time for a gender-neutral diverse field. BY PATRICIA LAGO ILLUSTRATION BAS VAN DER SCHOT
I
always believed that I found my vocation by accident. My teachers’ advice for high school was: “She can do whatever she wishes to.” This sounds nice, but for a 13 year old teenager it means: “And now what?” I chose a business school because my closest friends did. After two years I chose to specialize in computer programming because neither languages nor commerce sounded that exciting. I liked it, so much that after graduation I continued in computer science at the University of Pisa. That year about 50% of the students were women. I did not notice, as it is kind of normal. After all, this approximately mirrors the world population. About 30 years later I was asked to give a talk for the 30th anniversary of computer science in Amsterdam. The talk should have been on ‘something about women in computer science.’ Not my field of research, really - I work in software engineering! - but I gladly accepted: I was the only woman speaking, and I thought: maybe someone should speak up and make notice that computer science is a field dominated by men. I then realized that I did not find my vocation by accident: I found it because computer science was new, unexplored and therefore unbiased. I was free to chose anything I liked. Nobody at the time, in my environment, had a preconceived opinion. Computer science was an option like economics, law, arts and many others. Anyway, the point is: we get used to a certain reality: for instance, a majority of women teachers in elementary schools or a majority of men in IT professions. This
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nr 5 — 28 oktober 2015
ADVALVAS