ironment for many girls and women. Equally hostile to women are academic and professional pursuits of mathematics, sciences, engineering, computer sciences--all traditionally male fields that are closely linked with computers and the Internet. Research shows how women and girls are systematically steered away from these fields beginning as early as elementary school through school culture, classroom climate, traditional gender roles, and other societal pressures. Additionally, video games, largely marketed for men and boys, often depict girls and women as damsels in distress or sideshow prostitutes. Even those games, such as Tomb Raider, that challenge these stereotypical roles by casting strong, independent, heroic female characters in lead roles dress these big-breasted women with impossibly-dimensioned bodies in tight, revealing clothes. Most video game makers are men and most video game consumers are boys and men. So, instead of critiquing this fact and considering why it is so, the producers bow to market pressures and recycle the industry sexism. Unfortunately, a majority of information technology professionals cite video games as their initial point of interest in the field.
As a result of these and other socio-political, socio-historical, and socio-cultural dynamics, during the same year that women became over 50 percent of the online population, only 7 percent of all Bachelor's-level engineering degrees were conferred to women and only 20 percent of all information technology professionals were women. So, while equality in access rates reflects an important step forward, it does not, by any useful measurement, signify the end of the sex digital divide. In fact, the glaring inequities that remain despite equality in Internet access illustrate the urgency for a deeper, broader understanding of the digital divide and a deeper, broader approach for eliminating it.
These remaining inequities, which mirror deeply entrenched and historically cycled inequities in professional, economic, and education opportuniti