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What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?
Ellen Spertus ’90, a graduate student at MIT, wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of 6-to-1. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at MIT female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991.