第二步：精读重点段落

（Tips: 双击文中单词可以查释义并加入你的生词本哦）

第五段：
What happened in the mid-1980s that caused this turning point? I contend that one of the main reasons was the arrival of personal computers into the mainstream – the first IBM PCs but also computers from companies such as Sinclair, Commodore, and Amstrad: home computers that were a world away from those used in the specialist worlds of science and engineering, and which were marketed from the very beginning as “toys for boys”.

• contend 主张

第六段：
There was very little you could do with PCs in those days other than programme them to play games. The British government had, with the best of intentions, backed a programme to put a PC into every secondary school, but without providing for the necessary teacher training. This meant that the only people who used them were the self-taught PC programmers – mostly boys whose father had bought a PC at home. This only served to reinforce the stereotype that “girls don’t code”, a spurious claim that still reverberates today and which has directly led to the male-dominated, “tech-bro” computing industry with an entrenched, unequal gender balance in which the sort of views heard from James Damore, the Google staffer fired for his “Google memo” recently, are common.

• intention 企图
• reinforce 强化
• spurious 假的，伪造的
• reverberate 回响
• entrenched 根深蒂固的

第八段：
Much has been written over the last couple of weeks on this issue following Dalmore’s now infamous memo. I would absolutely agree that men and women are different in the way that we think and in the things that interest us, and those differences should be celebrated. But to conclude that accepting this implies we should accept the lack of diversity in the computing industry is to completely miss the point: it is precisely because we are different, and that all of us, men and women alike, now use computers and mobile computing devices in almost every aspect of our daily lives, that we need greater diversity in the computing industry. From those differences will come a broader characterisation of the problems we face, and wider range of creative approaches to their solution.

• infamous 臭名昭著的

（Tips: 双击文中单词可以查释义并加入你的生词本哦）

Growing role of artificial intelligence in our lives is “too important to leave to men”

第一段：
I must not have got the memo, because as a young lecturer in computer science at the University of Southampton in 1985 I was unaware that “women didn’t do computing”.

第二段：
Southampton had always recruited a healthy number of women to study computing in our fledgling department, and a quarter of the staff were women, but the student lists for the new academic year showed that quite suddenly, or so it appeared, we’d achieved the unenviable record of having no female students in that year’s intake.

• fledgling 刚开始的；无经验的

第三段：
Many women made important contributions to computing in its early decades, figures such as Karen Spärck Jones in Britain or Grace Hopper in the US, among many others who worked in the vital field of cryptography during the Second World War or, later, on the enormous challenges of the space race. But it had become clear that by the mid-1980s something fundamental had changed.

• cryptography 密码技术

第四段：
We found that UK university admission figures revealed that the number of girls studying computing had fallen dramatically compared to the number of boys: from 25% percent in 1978 to just 10% in 1985. This trend has never been reversed in the years since, at least in the developed world, and we live with the consequences today.

• reverse 反转

第五段：
What happened in the mid-1980s that caused this turning point? I contend that one of the main reasons was the arrival of personal computers into the mainstream – the first IBM PCs but also computers from companies such as Sinclair, Commodore, and Amstrad: home computers that were a world away from those used in the specialist worlds of science and engineering, and which were marketed from the very beginning as “toys for boys”.

• contend 主张

第六段：
There was very little you could do with PCs in those days other than programme them to play games. The British government had, with the best of intentions, backed a programme to put a PC into every secondary school, but without providing for the necessary teacher training. This meant that the only people who used them were the self-taught PC programmers – mostly boys whose father had bought a PC at home. This only served to reinforce the stereotype that “girls don’t code”, a spurious claim that still reverberates today and which has directly led to the male-dominated, “tech-bro” computing industry with an entrenched, unequal gender balance in which the sort of views heard from James Damore, the Google staffer fired for his “Google memo” recently, are common.

• intention 企图
• reinforce 强化
• spurious 假的，伪造的
• reverberate 回响
• entrenched 根深蒂固的

第七段：

Different culture, different effects

The story is very different in the developing world. Here, by the time PCs became cheap enough to be used in schools and bought by parents for use at home, technological progress meant they were much more interesting machines altogether. In countries outside the West, where girls didn’t know they “weren’t supposed to code”, they are as excited as the boys about the career possibilities opened up by computing. When I visit computer science classrooms in universities in India, Malaysia, and the Middle East, for example, I often find that over half the class is female, which leads me to conclude that gender differences in computing are significantly more cultural (nurture) than biological (nature).

第八段：
Much has been written over the last couple of weeks on this issue following Dalmore’s now infamous memo. I would absolutely agree that men and women are different in the way that we think and in the things that interest us, and those differences should be celebrated. But to conclude that accepting this implies we should accept the lack of diversity in the computing industry is to completely miss the point: it is precisely because we are different, and that all of us, men and women alike, now use computers and mobile computing devices in almost every aspect of our daily lives, that we need greater diversity in the computing industry. From those differences will come a broader characterisation of the problems we face, and wider range of creative approaches to their solution.

• infamous 臭名昭著的

第九段：

Too important to leave to men

For 30 years I have tried to encourage more girls to consider careers in computing, and it is so disheartening that the number of women working in the computing industry stays so resolutely flat. At around 15%, the proportion of women applying for computer science university courses remains far below what it was in the 1970s.

• resolutely 坚决地