Women and computing

So, I got this in my mailbox from my alma mater‘s College of Computing, announcing a lecture in their Distinguished Lecture Series:

Starting in 1995, Allan Fisher and Jane Margolis engaged in an interdisciplinary program of research and action in response to this situation. The research effort has been to understand male and female students’ engagement with computer science. The action component’s goal aims to devise changes to encourage the broadest possible participation in the computing enterprise. In part as a result of those efforts, the entering enrollment of women in the undergraduate Computer Science program at Carnegie Mellon rose from 7 percent in 1995 to 42 percent in 2000. Fisher and Margolis report on their experience in their recently released book, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing.

A cynical person might ask why this research is interesting or useful. After all, as far as I can tell no one is forcing college-age women to avoid their local computer science departments. (One Amazon reviewer said this book attempts to answer the question “why don’t people spend their lives the way I think they should?”)

It might be suggested that the authors have located a solution in search of a problem: is the state of the American technology industry suffering from having too few women graduate with undergraduate CS degrees? If so, then we should have a program of intervention (described in part in this review). Some of the interventions, like teaching instructors to be better teachers, would certainly seem worthwhile.
Others, like dumbing down the program, er, I mean “providing access to students with differing levels of experience and expertise”, don’t seem like such a hot idea. If CMU is going to offer remedial classes for students who want a CS degree but are not equipped to earn it, methinks they’re not going to remain in the upper tier of CS schools for very long.
I don’t know the answers to these questions, so I suppose I’ll have to read the book and find out. To help limit the spread of this kind of pseudo-scientific inquiry (the book is built around interviews with CMU undergrad students), I’ll get it from the local library. Of course, instead of reading the book, I could ask the lady we just hired, who is smart, talented, a snappy dresser, and pursuing a CS degree). Or I could ask Kasia, or this lady, or any number of others.
There are certainly real and pressing gender issues in the world (cf. equal pay for equal work and equal parental rights in divorce cases). What does it help to drag gender-ism (with its inherent suggestion that Bad People are making $group unable to participate in $activity) into an area– scientific and technical universities– where so far it hasn’t taken hold?
side note: I do find it amusing that Georgia Tech (well-known for its high male/female ratio) has a center for the study of women in science and technology. This is awfully ironic from a school that didn’t even admit women until 1952.