It documents the rise in the proportion of computer-science graduates who were women through the mid-eighties, and attempts to explain the precipitous decline that has taken place since then, from nearly forty per cent to less than twenty per cent.
However, the proportion of female computer science students has halved since its heyday in the mid-1980s.
"Women are going to be left behind," said Dr. Tracy Camp, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines who is co-chairwoman of the Association for Computing Machinery's Committee on Women in Computing, which has done several studies analyzing the proportion of women studying computer science.
The proportion of women studying computer science decreased from 37percentt in 1985 to 19percenttodayaccordingding to the National Science Foundation.
For example, the proportion of high consumers of computer games (>3 h daily) was almost 6 times higher among 17 18 year old boys compared to girls (35%% vs 6%%) [ 4].
Compared with the regional average, the proportion of available personal computers relative to the population is quite high, and cybercafes can be found in larger towns and cities. Agriculture in Cabo Verde is limited by the severe and recurrent droughts that affect the islands.
Meanwhile, figures from the Higher Education Funding Council for England show that the proportion of women in engineering, computer science and physics all declined in the three years to 2011/12, and remained static in mathematics.
Thus, an increase by 0.10 of the proportion of students reporting use of computers at home at least once or twice weekly implies a loss of 12 score points on the overall reading scale, which is quite a substantial effect (0.12 SD).
During that same period, the average new home in the U.S. grew in size by almost fifty per cent; the number of cars in the country increased by more than a hundred and twenty million; the proportion of families owning personal computers rose from zero to seventy per cent; and so on.
One noteworthy detail is the proportion of students who use computers for organizing appointments, to do lists, or making notes: 28% use such a personal organizer software several times per week, which may point to the use of personal digital assistants (PDA) or smart cell phones.
