More than Paradoxes to Offer: Exploring Motivations to Attract Women to Computing

The question we raise in this paper is why some women choose not to go into computing. What motivates their reasons for selecting their major and occupational goals? We interviewed twelve first year women who are not majoring in Computer Science and found half had pro-social goals for their careers. When asked if participants thought that people working in computing are helping people, some told us that they hadn’t thought about it before or they thought that maybe computing helped people indirectly through“business” aspects. We showed them pictures where technology obviously helped people, such as sign language translation for the deaf. Most were really interested in these pictures, and given the opportunity, thought that they would be interested in participating — they just never thought of computing or technology as helping people.