“It’s just appealing to what they think is important,” said University
of Ottawa engineering professor Catherine Mavriplis. Several studies
suggest “a lot of women are very socially minded – they want to help
people.”
Dr. Mavriplis points to Queen’s University, where nearly a third of
bachelor’s students in computing are women – far above the average.
The school has an option in biomedical computing – which incorporates
the life sciences, where women are a strong majority of students –
and it has proven popular. “You don’t even have to change the course
that much. You still have the heavy programming, but just tell them,
`okay, we’re going to calculate how many blood cells there are in this
blood.'”
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