Growing role of artificial intelligence in our lives is 'too important to leave to men'

I must not have got the memo, because as a young lecturer in computer science at the University of Southampton in 1985 I was unaware that "women didn't do computing". Southampton had always recruited a healthy number of women to study computing in our fledgling department, and a quarter of the staff were women, but the student lists for the new academic year showed that quite suddenly, or so it appeared, we'd achieved the unenviable record of having no female students in that year's intake. Many women made important contributions to computing in its early decades, figures such as Karen Spärck Jones in Britain or Grace Hopper in the US, among many others who worked in the vital field of cryptography during the Second World War or, later, on the enormous challenges of the space race. But it had become clear that by the mid-1980s something fundamental had changed. We found that UK university admission figures revealed that the number of girls studying computing had fallen dramatically compared to the number of boys: from 25% percent in 1978 to just 10% in 1985.