INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY : WANTED: FEMALE ENGINEERS AND COMPUTER SCIENTISTS.

• Position: Brief article

Everyone has heard of Steve Jobs, Apple's boss, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the creators of Google, or Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the proud inventor of Facebook. But including the name of a female celebrity in the very masculine world of information technology? That's quite another issue, and was the tricky question posed by Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes, on 7 March in Budapest, Hungary, on the eve of International Women's Day.

The reasons for such a gender gap go back a while. Women joined the labour market en masse from the late 1940s. They were low-paid workers who kept the machines going and, as from the late 1950s, as computers began to emerge, women ran them well, but were still paid and viewed as typists. They used the technology, but had no input into its design and evolution.

The result is that today, while women represent more than 50% of students in tertiary education and also hold more than 50% of...