Lea Coligado is a computer science student at Stanford University. She’s a woman, and she’s “floored” by the sexism in computer science. She’s the author of a piece in Fortune:
When I first came to Stanford in the fall of 2012, Computer Science was the last thing on my mind. I hail from a long line of doctors so naturally I was premed from the womb. On top of that, I had two years of high school experience being the only girl in an AP Computer Science course of 20 dudes—I had no intention of prolonging that experience. I started Stanford as an intended Biology major, enrolling in Stanford’s introductory Computer Science course CS106A only through peer pressure.
I loved CS106A so much I ended up taking a CS course every quarter my freshman year, and I declared my major in the fall of 2013. As I progressed further in my track, taking upper-level courses, I watched the number of girls in my CS classes slowly dwindle to the point that I could count 20 girls in a 100-person class on a good day (and two of them would just turn out to be men with long hair). And I began noticing all the inklings of sexism, something I’d previously thought of as media folklore.
Having spent the latter half of 2014 watching in horror as online mobs hounded women in gaming (for having committed the unspeakable sin of being women), I’m surprised that Coligado is surprised. Men on the internet are awful to women on the internet; why wouldn’t they be marginally less awful in person? But on the other hand, it has to be a good sign that someone can make it to their second year in college before encountering sexism.
That being said, some of stuff she’s experienced is pretty astounding. My favorite is the “well, then I should have applied” guy. Maybe computer science isn’t much more full of sexism than other fields; maybe these guys are just socially tone-deaf. (Nah.)