UC Berkeley at forefront of universities closing gender gap in computer science courses revamped for female students Male computer science majors still far outnumber female, but Professor Dan Garcia's class is a sign that efforts to attract more women to a field where they have always been vastly underrepresented are working. Berkeley, Stanford and a handful of other universities have experienced a marked uptick in the numbers of female computer science students. Gender-neutral models"It can be problematic to assume that all women are a certain way and therefore you should cater to that," said Sapna Cheryan, a University of Washington psychologist who has studied stereotypes in computer science. Cheryan pointed to "My Fair Physicist," a much-cited 2012 University of Michigan study that questioned whether having more feminine role models in science and math fields could counteract the discouraging stereotype that those fields are unfeminine. The study found that feminine role models actually reduced middle school girls' interest and perception of their own ability in math compared to more gender-neutral role models. Before registering, she knew nothing about programming, but decided based on her father's recommendation and the course title that "it might not be boring lines of code everywhere." A 2008 study by the Association for Computing Machinery, consulted in designing the Berkeley course, found that while college-bound boys equated words like "interesting," "video games," and "solving problems" with computing, girls associated terms like "typing," "math" and "boredom." Tackling misperceptions"Before I took Beauty and Joy I just thought computer science was people pent up in a room coding, looking like I look right before midterms," said Arany Uthanyakumar, 18, who took the Berkeley class last fall and also fell for it. Stanford similarly revamped its computer science program to make it more widely attractive in 2008. [...] female computer science enrollment has grown steeply, from 12.5 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013. [...] it was the perception that the class wasn't just pushing that masculine computing stereotype that got Mohammed, the Berkeley junior, in the door.