The preceding chapter examined boys' and girls' reactions to the opportunity to use a computer lab at lunchtime. However, gender differences in students' reactions to computing were not restricted to that milieu. Enrollment patterns at Whitmore for courses involving computing reflected gender-linked patterns that have been documented elsewhere in large-scale surveys. For example, as mentioned earlier, Whitmore girls were much more likely than boys to enroll in the business courses in which computers were used for word processing, consistent with Becker and Sterling's (1987) finding that the only computer-intensive courses in which girls were overrepresented relative to their proportion in the student population are word processing classes.

Also consistent with national trends was the finding that girls at Whitmore were somewhat less likely than boys to enroll in programming courses (Anderson, Welch, & Harris, 1984; Chen, 1986; Linn, 1985; Lockheed, 1985; Sutton, 1991). The difference between the male and female enrollment in Computer Science 1 was relatively small. However, in both years of the study male enrollment outpaced female enrollment, resulting in a total of 95 male Computer Science 1 students over the 2-year period compared with 80 female students. (African American students enrolled in Computer Science 1 in numbers just slightly under their representation in the track from which most computer science students came, constituting 56% of the computer science students and about 60% of the students in the regular track.) The disparity between male and female enrollment in computer science increased substantially as students progressed from the introductory to the more advanced courses, a trend also found in previous studies (Linn, 1985; Oakes, 1990).