If you look around a computer science classroom, the offices of a Silicon Valley startup or your standard corporate IT department, you’ll see far more men than women.
Even as women outnumber men in the work force, and as they’ve adopted mobile technology and social media with gusto, the computer and information technology fields remain male-dominated.
“There is a serious gender divide,” said Amanda Quaranto, a deployment engineer for the Amherst office of Engine Yard, a cloud-computing service based in San Francisco.
Nationally and here in Buffalo Niagara, a growing number of women are working to get more of their peers interested in writing software, designing apps for smartphones and tablets, working in cybersecurity and other high-tech jobs.
These efforts – which mirror campaigns meant to boost the presence of blacks and Latinos in the field – include reaching out to school-age children, mentoring college students and setting up monthly networking sessions and computer code-writing classes aimed at women.
Advocates say ending the gender imbalance in the IT realm is a matter of basic fairness. And they say it’s good business, too, for companies that want to market their gadgets and apps to all consumers.
“If we want technology to serve all of society, we need everybody at the table making decisions,” said Liesl Folks, the dean of the University at Buffalo’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who previously worked for IBM and Hitachi Corporation developing magnetic data storage technologies.
The gender gap in computers – like the gap in math and science – is wide, and it begins early, according to data collected by the University of Colorado’s National Center for Women and Information Technology. Consider:
•While women filled 57 percent of white-collar jobs in 2012, they filled just 26 percent of professional computing jobs.
•Fifty-seven percent of college students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 were women, but just 18 percent of those earning a degree in computer or information science that year were women. The share of women earning those degrees has fallen since 1985, when they earned 37 percent.
•And 56 percent of high school Advanced Placement test-takers in 2012 were girls, but only 19 percent of those taking the AP Computer Science exam were girls.
“People, when they heard what my degree was, were surprised,” said Shawna Matthews, 31, a senior software engineer for Synacor Inc., who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at UB after studying the same subject at Niagara County Community College.
But while she was in school, Matthews added, “I was never made to feel out of place.”
At UB, there were 510 undergraduates majoring in computer science and engineering as of the spring semester. Just 10 percent are women, though 20 percent of graduate students in the department are women, according to the university.
At Synacor, the Internet content provider located on the Buffalo waterfront, less than 20 percent of the employees in its engineering group are women, according to Meredith Roth, a spokeswoman, who added that the company seeks talented workers no matter their gender.
“I don’t see too many women involved in the Buffalo tech community,” said Elena Moiseeva, 25, a native of Russia who is studying digital media at NCCC.
Why are so few women studying computer science or filling IT jobs?
Among the many theories is the idea of self-selection: Girls and young women choose not to pursue computer science as a career path because they just don’t like it.
Boys, for example, are more likely to spend hours playing video games, which primarily are geared toward them, and later in life they’re more apt to want to design the newest versions of those games.
“I think it’s just interest, and pushing little kids toward different things,” said Katie Barnum, 27, a web developer for UB’s College of Arts and Sciences. “I think it should be gender neutral.”
It’s not enough for companies to have programs that encourage diversity in their work forces, experts said. A number of groups are working to wel