Jeanette Wings talks about upcoming NSF role

02.02.2007

Are you troubled by the decline of women in CS? It has certainly been troubling the CS community the past few years. We were making progress, and then more recently the numbers have been going in the wrong direction. But it's not just an issue of women or diversity, maybe the real problem is the image of computing, an image of what a computer scientist is and what a computer scientist does. It's not just a gender thing that we are seeing, it's the overall decline in undergraduate enrollment in CS. So I think [we should] enhance the image of computing and say, 'It's not just geeky, nerdy types, and it's not just programming.' There are some deep, theoretical challenges that we don't know the answers to.