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The gender gap in computer use is closing. But another deeper divide continues to widen.
Although women entering college use computers almost as much as men, they are far less confident about their computer skills than their male peers, according to a survey released on Monday by the University of California at Los Angeles.
The Internet is helping narrow the gap. A nationwide report by Pew Research last March also found that the gender gap in Internet use is closing. Women also made up the majority of online holiday shoppers for the first time this past season, according to a recent survey.
"Women are definitely using (computers and the Internet) equal to men," said Jane Margolis, a researcher at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. "But if you probe a little deeper to look at who feels more familiarity ... more comfort with complex programming, that's where you find a real gender gap."
The annual UCLA survey polled over 400,000 students at 717 colleges and universities nationwide. Data from 269,413 of those students was statistically adjusted to represent the 1.1 million freshmen entering four-year higher-education institutions.
First-year college women and men reported almost equal computer use, with 77.8 percent of women reporting frequent computer use, compared to 79.5 percent of men.
But female freshmen were only half as likely as men to rate their computer skills highly. Only 23.2 percent of women, compared with 46.4 percent of men, rated their computer skills as "above average" or "within the top 10 percent" of people their age.
The study also found that first-year college women spend less time on the Internet, in chat rooms and playing computer and video games.
Only 1.8 percent of women, compared to 9.3 percent of the men surveyed, said they planned to enter computer programming as a career -- the largest gap in the survey's history.
"This is an area where the gender gap has done nothing but grow larger," said Linda Sax, the survey's director.
"Although computing career interests in men are seeing a real resurgence, we're seeing much less of a resurgence in women," said Allan Fisher, former associate dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
But just because there's a huge self-reported gender gap, that does not mean there's an actual gender gap in ability, Sax said.
The results are troubling, say experts, who fear that women who lack computing confidence may miss out on the increasing number of technology-related job opportunities.
"Women are losing out on many opportunities in fields that can be very lucrative," Sax said.
What's more, the computer industry is also losing out on the talent of skilled women to help fill the shortage of trained workers.
While women are showing more interest in predominantly male majors such as math and life sciences, the gap isn't narrowing in the computer science and engineering fields, Margolis said.
The widening gap in women's interest in computing careers could be a reaction to the survey's use of the term 'programmer,' Fisher said. Female participants may perceive computer programming as a narrowly defined occupation, when in fact the field is much broader.
Women may also be turned off to the notion of computer programming careers as isolated cubicle-bound jobs.
"There's a much stronger negative public perception of what computer programming is like," Fisher said. "That (stereotype) tends to be more deterring to women than to men."
The gender gap in computing confidence also exists among the group of women who would appear to be the most secure in their technical skills: computer science majors.
According to researchers at the Carnegie Mellon Project on Gender and Computer Science who analyzed four years of interviews with male and female computer science majors, female students tend to underestimate their abilities far more than male students.
In computer science, women tend to enter undergraduate programs with less programming experience than men, Fisher said.
Based on their interviews with Carnegie Mellon computer science majors, Margolis and Fisher found that while 38 percent of first year men had significant self-initiated, out-of-school programming experience, only 10 percent of women had such experience.
That lack of experience can also deter women, even though it might not matter in overall results at the undergraduate level, Fisher said.
Even women who are exceptionally good at computer science at the undergraduate level often have their confidence shaken because they are surrounded by men who have had more hands-on computing experience or at least appear to be more technologically competent, Margolis said.
"I've been playing with computers since I was four and coding since I was 5 or 6..." said one Carnegie Mellon female computer science student who researchers interviewed. "Then I got here and just felt so incredibly overwhelmed by the other people in the program (mostly guys, yes) that I began to lose interest in coding because really, whenever I sat down to program there would be tons of people around going, 'My God, this is so easy, why have you been working on it for two days, when I finished it in five hours,' and 'Geez, you're such a terrible hacker, you must have only gotten into SCS because you're a girl,' and so on."
Even though women tend to enter computer science programs with a high degree of confidence, they often lose confidence and interest in the field early on.
"There's a nexus of confidence and interest," Margolis said. "As confidence drops, so does interest."
"It's hard to hold on to an interest if you feel you're not as good as your peers," Margolis said. "The irony is that many of these women are just as good."
Through concerted efforts to adjust the curriculum to attract more women, Carnegie Mellon has increased its enrollment of female computer science majors from 7 percent of the entering class in 1995 to 42 percent in 2000.
"We need to try to make computer science and computing a more welcoming domain for a broader group of people," Fisher said.
To meet this goal, educators need to encourage young girls to explore computer programming and teach them how computers interact with other fields of interest, Sax said.
"If women aren't shaping the decisions of technology, there's a risk that technology won't be as interesting or as relevant or as useful for women," Sax said.
But it's not just women who will suffer if skilled female programmers and designers don't pursue technology-related careers.
"Women are using the Internet more equally, but it's not carrying into who's actually designing and building systems," Fisher said. "More is needed than just comfort and computer use."
