Why Do Female Students Tend to Avoid Computer Studies?

Abstract

Two hundred and ten students of business and natural science subjects, many of whom were qualified to study computing, were given a questionnaire during their first year enrolment. The questionnaire concerned their choice of course and why they chose not to study computing. The results, both open ended and statistical, indicated that computing had a very bad image problem as a future career or subject to study. The greatest perceived problem was that students of both sexes, but particularly females, wished to work with humans, not machines, and that computing was perceived to involve sitting at a computer terminal most of the time. Females gave relatively slight importance to the prospect of male domination putting them off choosing computing. School computer experience was reported as often either minimal or non existent, particularly for females, or to have been sufficiently negative to put the students off computing.