Making It All Compute: Busting Cultural Barriers from Egypt to the United States

Lamia Youseff, a project manager at Google, was a few years into her graduate program in computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), when she suddenly noticed that she was the only female student in her advanced operating systems class. She was somewhat baffled. Her undergraduate class in computer science at The American University in Cairo had been 50% men and 50% women, and it was common for a female student to be at the top of the class. "I never realized that computer science as a field is a male-dominated field until I moved to the U.S.," she says. "Luckily," she adds, "I was the top student in that class as well."