Where the Girls Aren't Anyone who has ever tried to pry a girl offline knows that girls like computers. They just don't understand how they work. Computer science, the mathematics-based study of programming, is so unpopular among girls that even the most rigorous girls' schools rarely find enough students to fill a class. Tech-minded teachers worry that programming is to this generation what math was to their mothers -- a boys' club preventing girls from getting a foothold in the technological world.