Billy Gallagher writes at TechCrunch:

Bonnie McLindon, a junior computer science major at Stanford University, fumes as she works in CS 103, her hardest class at Stanford, office hours. The two guys sitting behind her are referring to the tinsel in her hair, a tradition of Stanford’s Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Despite serving as section leader and interning at Apple, McLindon struggles with the stereotype that girls, especially sorority girls, don’t major in computer science.

At Stanford, just under 21 percent of undergraduate CS majors, the school’s most popular major, are women.

The school is situated in the heart of Silicon Valley, which is starved for talented engineers; companies aggressively recruit Stanford undergrads with coding skills for high paying internships and full time jobs.

“Getting more girls involved in CS is probably the most impactful thing we can do to address the talent shortage,” Sequoia Capital’s Jim Goetz tells me.

In 2009, the Stanford CS department revamped its undergraduate curriculum, broadening the program so students could focus on tracks in areas that most interested them. Stanford Professor Mehran Sahami says the addition of multi-disciplinary tracks, such as collaboration with psychology, product design, and others, helped to cast a broader net for potential CS majors.

The department has seen growth across the board since the 2009 revisions, Sahami says, with female enrollment increasing faster on a relative basis. Since 2009, the number of female undergraduates majoring in CS at Stanford has increased 9.5 percentage points.

Feels like improvement.

Ben Horowitz says there are no silver bullets: http://bhorowitz.com/2011/10/26/lead-bullets/