Given that many urban students exclude Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics careers from their career choices, the present study focuses on urban high school students and adopts the social-cultural approach to understand the following questions: how do students envision their careers? What are the experiences that shape students’ self-reflections? And how do students’ self-reflections influence the way they envision their future careers? Five students were interviewed and data were coded in two ways: by topic domains and confidence levels. The research findings indicate that

As a minority in the upper levels of the computing profession, women are sometimes mistreated through ignorance or malice. Some women have learned to respond with wit and panache. This article is part of a special issue of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) Newsletter.

In Australia and the USA there are now more female undergraduates--right across the board, except in computer science and engineering, which is an issue we need to address --than there are males And it's partly as a result of the pressures of the information revolution. Suddenly corporations--and nations--need all the bright/creative people they can get. They can't afford to ignore half the resources! And for the first time in history, women are free to use their brains! This article is part of a special issue of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) Newsletter.

The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline (Camp 1997) describes a serious problem for computer science (CS) professionals everywhere. CS continually loses women at all stages of the pipeline including elementary, middle, and high schools, college, graduate school and beyond. Thus, the computing industry has lost access to a large pool of potential computer professionals. As a result, ACM's Committee on Women in Computing [ ACM-W: www.acm.org/women ] donated the appropriate funds needed to acquire current graduation and undergraduate enrollment statistics, which will provide an updated view of the

A review of: The Technology of Orgasm; "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. By Rachel P. Maines. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. This article is part of a special issue of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) Newsletter.

In this article, I wish to explore some of the ways in which considerations of gender should be taken seriously in the newly developing discipline of computer ethics. Over the last two decades, computer ethics has developed into a separate academic and practical discipline. Much of the rationale for its formation derives from the attempts of computer and IT workers to form themselves into a recognized profession with suitable codes of ethics. Additionally, legislation must keep pace with new forms of crime as they become possible via networked technology. Alongside this, every week seems to

In August 1999, Lara Croft donned the cover of Playboy. One month later, she held the cover page of PSM (Play Station Magazine, the most frequent figure appearing on the cover in PSM's history--four times in two years). The two images were strikingly different, as one can imagine. But, the implications of the two representations are indeed significant and call into question the ideas of reality, identity, gender, and representation. Which Lara Croft is "real?" Which one, if either, is a figure with whom girls and women in the world of games and beyond can identify in any meaningful way? Or, is

The Internet is imagined as an all-inclusive technology that will allow everyone, regardless of social status, gender, or ability, to communicate equally. The full title of a recent book is The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know. But has the offline world really changed? Or is what is happening online merely a reflection of real-world power structures and communications? One possible answer is: the world has changed because online communities allow geographically diverse people to form relationships, whereas previously the mere

Brillo is an electronic journal devoted to the inclusion of marginalized voices in the movement towards a global information infrastructure. It's also cranky and witty and feminist and funny, and you can find it at [ http://www.virago-net.com/brillo/ ]. We here reprint the editorial rant from the introductory issue and look back on our experiences with Brillo. This article is part of a special issue of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) Newsletter.

Starting with the early popularization of the Internet, and as recently as the mid-1990's, gender has been claimed to be invisible in text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC)-the absence of physical cues as to a message sender's identity was thought to remove all trace of information as to gender, race, social class, etc. from the message, making the medium inherently democratic and egalitarian. However, claims of widespread gender anonymity have not been supported by research on online interaction. In the present essay, I report on what has been found in a number of empirical studies