Study finds the bulk of shoes’ carbon footprint comes from
manufacturing processes. Now and then, an ambitious graduate
student will decide to tackle a particularly sticky problem in
science or engineering. One such student, Douglas Ricket,
created the Women's Technology Program as a partial solution to
a tough problem with social rather than technical roots. Ricket,
a 23-year-old graduate student in electrical engineering and
computer science, discovered a deeply entrenched difficulty in
his field while teaching an electronics course for high school
students. He came up against it again as a teaching assistant in
an artificial intelligence course. The problem: few women go
into electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). Women
majoring in computer science peaked nationally in 1984 at 37
percent, but dropped to 28 percent by 1994. Last year at MIT,
more than 40 percent of undergraduates were women, but women
made up only 20 percent of EECS majors, which is the largest
major at the Institute. By contra