1583 Chapter 4.10 Gender and Computing at University in the UK Ruth Woodfeld University of Sussex, UK Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. IntroductIon In the late 1970s, women’s progress and participa- tion in the more traditional scientifc and techni- cal felds, such as physics and engineering, was slow, prompting many feminist commentators to conclude that these areas had developed a near- unshakeable masculine bias. Although clearly rooted in the domains of science and technology, the advent of the computer was initially seen to challenge this perspective. It was a novel kind of artefact, a machine that was the subject of its own newly created feld: “computer science” (Poster, 1990, p. 147). The fact that it was not quite subsumed within either of its parent realms led commentators to argue that computer science was also somewhat ambiguously positioned in relation to their identity as masculine. As such, it was claimed that its future trajectory as equally masculine could not be assumed, and the feld of computing might offer fewer obstacles and more opportunities for women than they had experi- enced before. Early predictions of how women’s role in relation to information technology would develop were consequently often highly optimistic in tone. Computing was hailed as “sex-blind and colour-blind” (Williams, Cited in Griffths 1988, p. 145; see also Zientara, 1987) in support of a belief that women would freely enter the educa- tional feld, and subsequently the profession, as the 1980s advanced. During this decade, however, it became in- creasingly diffcult to deny that this optimism was misplaced. The numbers of females undertaking undergraduate courses in the computer sciences stabilised at just over a ffth of each cohort through the 1980s and 1990s, and they were less likely to take them in the more prestigious or research- based universities (Woodfeld, 2000). Tracy Camp’s landmark article “The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline” (1997), using data up to 1994, plotted the fall-off of women in computer science between one educational level and the next in the US. It noted that “a critical point” was the drop-off before bachelor-level study—critical because the loss of women was dramatic, but also because a degree in computer science is often seen as one of the best preparatory qualifcations for working