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Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. Cambridge: MIT P, 2002. 172 pp.
While Unlocking the Clubhouse:Women in Computing does not focus on the teaching of writing, it should be a part of every two-year college's library collection for both faculty and student use. Given the increasing frequency with which our writing classes are being taught in computerized classrooms, two-year college writing teachers should be concerned about the subtle ways in which even our classrooms may be more comfortable and hospitable places for males than they are for females.Women's or gender studies classes would also find the research compelling and useful.
In their well-designed four-year qualitative and quantitative study, conducted from 1995 to 1999, the authors explored key differences in males' and females' experiences with computers before and during college and investigated what they label "the leaky pipeline" that leads women to leave computer science (3). They conducted over 230 interviews with more than 100 male and female Carnegie Mellon University computer-science students using a longitudinal research model that allowed for tracking the students over time. One of their overall conclusions was, "Very early in life, computing is claimed as male territory" (4), both by boys' actively claiming it and by girls' passively ceding it. Margolis and Fisher express hope that their research will be used to help girls and women find their rightful place in a world increasingly shaped by a cyberspace culture.
In their introduction, Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher claim that while women use the computer by surfing the Web and shopping online in numbers equal to men, "few women are learning how to invent, create, and design computer technology" (2).Additionally, only one in five computer-science research graduates is female and thus "girls and women [ ...] are missing the educational and economic opportunities that are falling into the laps of computer-savvy young men" (2). For a number of reasons, we all should be alarmed about such silencing and exclusion of women from the field.
The first chapter, "The Magnetic Attraction," reveals that as early as kindergarten boys have connected with computers more intensely and passionately than have girls, for whom the attraction is "more moderate and gradual" (17).Young girls were less likely than boys to have...