Nestled between sports coaches' offices on the second floor of Halligan Hall, Associate Computer Science Professor Anslem Blumer's office is secluded from many students-especially female ones.
"Women aren't necessarily valued as part of the club," Blumer said in reference to the small proportion of women pursuing a computer science bachelor's degree at the University.
Tufts' undergraduate computer science program is strongly dominated by male students. Of the 63 declared computer science majors at the University, 10 - just under 16 percent - are women.
The computer science graduate program shows a stronger female presence. Nine students - 31 percent - of Tufts' 29 master's students are women. In the Ph.D. program, 16 (or 44 percent) of the 44 candidates are female.
Lenore Cowen, also an Associate Professor in the University's computer science department, attributed the stronger numbers of women in the department's graduate program to the program's strong reputation.
"I think that graduate students all over are learning that Tufts has a good...warm and friendly department," she said.
Low numbers of female students are typical in computer science departments. According to the National Science Foundation, while the percentage of women in computer science programs increased between 1975 to 1998, women still earned only a quarter of the bachelor's degrees in the field in 1998.
Cowen also testified to the low percentages of women in the major.
Cowen said that in one of her classes, Algorithms, a fifth of the students are female, and that in her other class, Cryptography, women constitute a quarter of students.
"Among our undergrads, that's very typical," she said.
Cowen said that common stereotypes of computer science majors can deter women from pursuing the career path.
"They-women in particular-have an image of computer science [students] as people who eat Twinkies and drink a lot of Coke," she said.
Cowen said that while many males enter college thinking that they will be computer scientists, many women faculty ultimately stumbled upon the field by chance through an introductory programming course.
Blumer highlighted ways that Tufts has sought to expose women to opportunities in computer science and create a female-friendly programming environment.
Blumer said that over half the department's faculty is female. Also, Computer Science 10 - the introductory course for non-majors - is always taught by a female professor. Blumer also said that he assigns group projects in his courses that require teamwork among students of both genders.
Shivani Sheopory, a freshman planning on declaring a computer science major, said a high-school programming course she took hooked her to the field.
"It came easy to me...it clicked. I loved the instantaneous logic, the problem solving," she said.
Yet fewer females and males nationwide are majoring in computer science. According to both the National Science Foundation and a study completed researchers at the University of Virginia (U.Va.), the number of computer science majors in the U.S. has decreased since 2000.
Both Blumer and Cowen said the boom in Internet companies in the late 1990s was responsible for the popularity of the major at that time. "People were overly optimistic." Cohen said. "Their parents made them...there was that energy."
The U.Va. study was prompted by attrition rates from the school's computer science department.
In 1998, J. McGrath Cohoon, a U. Va sociologist, surveyed her school's computer science and biology departments to determine why the computer science department lost women at a rate nine percentage points higher than men.
Initial study results suggested that gender composition of faculty, faculty attitudes and behaviors, institutional support for the department, and the local job market all affected attrition rates.
A number of professional and academic organizations within the computer science field have devoted committees to support for women in the field.
One such group is the Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research. On its Web site, the committee lists four methods it uses to help computer science- oriented women succeed in the field.
These include community building through networking and collaboration, research mentoring, information sharing among academics and professionals, and effecting organizational change.
