Laura Beckwith, a recent PhD recipient at Oregon State University, wrote her dissertation on how men and women are impacted differently by end-user programming software (such as spreadsheet formulas, Flash programming, CAD). I’ve only had time to read about 20 pages of it, so I may comment on this more another time (for now I’m relying on the AP article for the summary of her results). Previous research which she cited in her study showed that women studying computer science are less confident in their computer skills than men — not just men studying computer science, but men in general. I’ll assume a probable corollary that women who don’t study CS are even less confident. Confidence is a crucial factor for success. More importantly, since I’ve seen people succeed despite a lack of confidence, its crucial for happiness. If you feel constantly insecure about what you’re doing, you don’t enjoy it very much. We have to keep more girls interested in computers, and it has to start at an earlier age than college. Remember that scene in the movie “Jurassic Park” when Lex (the girl who screams a lot) sits down in front of the park’s mainframe and says “It’s Unix! I know this!” and then she kicks some ass (virtually)? That’s the feeling. How do we make it happen? Is it improving already with the ubiquity of computers? We shouldn’t wait and see. (For those of you who laughed at that scene because you didn’t see how Lex knew it was Unix, it actually was a Silicon Graphics machine running a real-life 3D file navigation system on Irix.)