Valentine’s Day is tomorrow and I, much like many other nerds, likely will spend the evening alone on my computer. Instead of caressing a woman I’ll be validating code, instead of buying roses I’ll be calibrating my monitor.

And I have to ask, how many women are out there doing this too? Not just single women on Valentine’s Day that is, but how many out there are geeks?

At first glance, the statistics look grim for guys hoping to find romance with a nice girl who enjoys wine, long walks on the beach and Unix. But I know there are nerdettes out there; it’s just a matter of finding them.

Now you, dear reader, may be thinking I’m only going to complain I’m alone on a day of romance, I’ll never find the girl for me (supermodel by day, Ruby on Rails and AJAX master at night), but no. This column isn’t about romance, per se, but about the general lack of visible women as technology pioneers today.

Believe it or not, this was not always the case.

Take Grace Hopper for example. Hopper pioneered early programming languages, like FORTRAN and COBOL and helped invent the first computer/calculator. And she did it all the way back in the 1970s.

Oh yeah, she is also attributed with coining the term ‘computer bug,’ when she remarked that Harvard scientists trying to remove a moth from a computer were ‘debugging it.’ Talk about being l337.

Then there’s Ada Lovelace, who, not content with having merely written about the first computer ever, made a mechanical contraption you may have heard of called the Babbage Machine. She can officially be called the first programmer, since she wrote the first piece of software for the computer in London, in the 1830s – almost a century before Britain gave women the right to vote.

But now the women pioneers seem to be few and far between.

To look at the facts though, the number of women with degrees in computing-related fields is shrinking. The number of females with a bachelor’s degree in computer science dropped 37 percent between 1985 and 2001, and in roughly the same time period women in information technology fields dropped from 33 to 26 percent, according to a National Science Foundation study.

Slowly but surely, it seems women in computer technology are becoming an endangered species.

Case in point: respected tech Web site CNET recently published a list of its Top 10 Girl Geeks, the only ‘relevant’ one (and I use that term loosely) from the past decade was Paris Hilton, because she’s ‘(been) photographed often with her PSP (PlayStation Portable).’

Now despite all my geek cred, I can’t begin to posit why women are abandoning computer and science-related fields when the industry is booming, but I can say that the women who remain certainly have an edge in the job market.

And they should take advantage of the growing market. The big names in the industry right now – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos – are all men, and apparently women have. . . Paris Hilton.

So ladies, instead of flowers and candy Thursday night, find your geeky friend, cozy up with a C++/Visual Basic manual and spend all night validating each other’s code.

A.J. Chavar once knew a girl who typed ‘sudo rm -rf /’ into the command line of his heart. Ladies, if any of you got that joke, e-mail him at ajchavar@syr.edu. Guys can e-mail him too if they want, but only about the column.

Published on February 12, 2008 at 12:00 pm