I'm a Computer Science graduate and I'm now a programmer analyst for a software development firm.
I really don't remember why or who influenced me, but I grew up never realizing that girl's aren't "supposed" to be good at or interested in maths and sciences. I gradutated from high school in 1981, just before they introduced computers into the school, so I had no exposure to computers when I graduated high school. My father is a mechanical engineer and for some reason I always thought that if (a big if) I went to university I'd take electrical engineering.
But I wasn't interested in going to university right away - I graduated high school when I'd just turned 17 and wanted to live a little first. I got a job 1/2 days when I was still in high school at my the company where my father worked as a photocopy girl. This was boring, but I was good at it so they liked me. I think my father influenced this a little, but when their summer student that was helping them with computer analysis of pipeline data went back to school, they moved me into doing (hand drawn) graphs of these huge pipeline simulation runs, and eventually got me into writing the JCL batch jobs to do the simulations. The project was eventually cancelled, but I'd had my first exposure to computers and I was interested. Later on another company needed help with data entry and asked a friend of mine (who was a secretary) to do it. She couldn't figure it out but suggested that I'd be good for the job, so they hired me part time at first, then full time. I was at that job for 5-1/2 years and thought I knew everything about computers and the end of that time.
Somehow they talked me into going to university part-time (they saw my potential I guess and the office was a block from the university in a research park). They wanted me to take economics because they were all economists, but I'd seen too much of the fudging that they did with their data so that career path didn't interest me in the least. One of the guys in the office (my supervisor) was a programmer by trade and thought I had the inclination so he encouraged me to take courses towards a computer science degree. Well I just got started when they laid me off, so I thought "what the heck, I'll go to school full time". Even then I thought of the electrical engineering, but my dad sat me down and told me how badly women were still treated in the man's world of engineering, so I decided to stick with the degree I'd taken one course towards and get my computer science degree.
Dad's little talk seemed hilarious when I got to third year and looked around my classes and thought "where'd all the girls go?" It turns out there are far fewer women in computer science than in engineering (I think the statistic is still only about 5% female), but neither me nor my father knew this so we didn't think twice about me taking computer science.
I think one thing that may encourage females to go into the sciences is that they are almost guaranteed a job when they graduate. Most companies see the major gender imbalance and want to rectify it so they're looking for females to hire. It's kind of reverse discrimination if you will, but it's real and can be used to our advantage.
One other thing, I did a couple of aptitude tests over the years and computer work showed up as being something I'd be good at, so maybe that's where I got the idea that I could do it. I had the usual teacher plans when I was small - the only "female" occupation I could conceive of doing. My mom is a nurse, but that never appealed to me at all. I didn't know any women who were particularly science- oriented, but I did have a chemistry teacher in high school who was really neat and was a female.
Adele Hunter, Programmer Analyst | Don't tell me not to burn the SMART Technologies Inc. | candle at both ends - tell me e-mail: ahunter@smarttech.com | where to get more wax!