From Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold:

“The nerd factor is huge,” Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.

This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. “They think of it as programming,” Dr. Cuny said. “They don’t think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth.”

Here’s a thought: if “staring into a screen writing computer code” doesn’t appeal to you, maybe you shouldn’t be a computer science major. Girls think of computer science as programming for a reason, and that reason is that it is actually programming, for the most part. We all know that you can do awesome things with programs, but they don’t write themselves.

And incidentally, the reason I don’t have a bachelor’s in CS is not that I was put off by the “nerd factor.” It’s that my high school’s idea of a computer science program consisted of classes in typing and desktop publishing, and I had no exposure to anything else till halfway through college, when it was too late to declare a double major. (I minored instead.)