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Let's try a mental experiment.

Try to picture a young computer hacker up late, carbonated caffeinated drink handy, compiling and debugging the latest batch of code.

Do you have a mental image? Is the person in your Polaroid male or female?

Chances are pretty good you pictured a man. If so, you can be mostly forgiven, because you're mostly right. In the United States, about 90 percent of the time, you'd be right.

Virginia Tech is typical of U.S. universities in many ways, and undergraduate enrollment in computer science is one of them. In 1976, Tech's computer science department was 50 percent female. In 2001, it was about 92 percent men.

Radford University's student population is about 75 percent female, but in information science and technology, women account for just a little more than 7 percent.

In science, engineering and technology studies in general, women make up about half the student population in the United States and in Europe. But women hold less than 20 percent of full professor positions at universities that grant doctorates.

At Virginia Tech, women hold less than 13 percent of tenured or tenure-track professorships -- in all departments, not just computer science.

The small percentage of women who do make it to the highest levels academically are much more likely to report negative experiences with colleagues, evaluation and promotion and balancing work and family life.

The American Association of University Women studies these issues. In 2000, it found that just as it is among professors, only about 20 percent of the information technology work force is female.

The group interviewed young women to try to understand their negative attitudes toward computer science and concluded: "Girls can do science, they just don't want to."

Before you dismiss that statement as hopelessly patronizing, let's look at it.

Why might young women not want to "do" science? It's not that women aren't interested in the Internet -- at least half of Web and e-mail users are female. I think that girls adopt this sour-grapes attitude toward technology because they know very well they are not supposed to "do" computers.

This at least partially is the result of a perception that females are not as good as males at math, an attitude that comes from studies conducted in the 1970s. These studies were widely publicized, but the studies that refuted the findings as being based on experience instead of aptitude were not.

The media often is more interested in studies that reinforce stereotypes than those that show no difference.

Since the days of Lt. Uhuru on the original Star Trek series, we've seen a woman starship captain, but she is certainly the exception. And that's on television. In the real world of information technology, the trend is going the other direction.

This year, I spent my spring break at Tech taking a workshop on detecting and dealing with computer crackers. It was a weeklong feast of geekery that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I did an informal head count and found about 20 women in the sea of 250 alpha-geeks. At the end of the workshop, after the five-hour game of "capture the flag" (as in, hack into the instructor's computers and find the flags), I asked instructor Ed Skoudis about the attendance.

I was surprised by his answer -- he said the gender mix was actually quite atypical. Usually female attendance is only 1 percent to 2 percent!

Skoudis teaches all over the country for the SANS security institute. He thought female attendance was higher at the Tech session because it was in an academic setting. In corporate computer security workshops, he said, there are almost no women.

So why are there any women at all "doing computers"?

For myself, my parents and peers had a lot to do with it. When I was in the single digits, my dad had a TRS-80 that I learned to program using BASIC. I was never told that I couldn't or shouldn't do something because I was a girl. My mom would have been horribly disappointed by that kind of attitude.

I also had the good fortune to have friends who encouraged me to tinker. I'm not too worried about breaking something, as I'm pretty confident that I can fix it.

Does all this really matter? Can we just use the tools and get on with it? Maybe, but we'll never know how different things might be as long as the female hacker is such a curiosity.

As a friend at the Radford arsenal recently said to me, "I won't win until I am just a chemist. Not a female chemist. Just a chemist."

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.