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Belinda Parmar, center, encouraged girls at King Alfred School in London to consider careers in male-dominated technology fields. Andrew Testa for The International Herald Tribune

LONDON - At 16, Isabelle Aleksander spends hours writing computer code and plans a career in engineering. Her latest passion is the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, credit-card-size computer developed to help teach programming.

But when she told her best friend, his response was not what she had expected. "He was like, 'Wait, how do you know about them? You're a girl and you shouldn't be doing that,' "Ms. Aleksander said incredulously.

She and another friend, Honey Ross, 15, are among the few girls at King Alfred School, their private school in North London, with an intense interest in technology. The two say they understand why: computing can seem boring from the outside, populated mainly by nerdy boys.

"It's sad," Ms. Ross said, between classes in the computer lab. "It's such an amazing world. It's kind of waiting for loads of young girls" to jump in.

Belinda Parmar would love to see that happen, particularly since statistics suggest that women in technology, already a relative rarity, are about to get even scarcer.

Three years ago, Ms. Parmar founded Lady Geek, a consulting firm that helps technology companies connect with female customers and bolster the number of women in work forces. Convinced that the paucity of women in technology has its roots in earlier life, Ms. Parmar last fall started Little Miss Geek, a nonprofit aimed at convincing girls that programming is not solitary and boring, but creative and eventually lucrative work.

Both sexes love gadgets - but while girls may enjoy owning the latest devices, parents and teachers do not point out that they also have the brains to build them, Ms. Parmar says.

"They're dreaming of using the iPad mini and the latest smartphone, but they're not dreaming of creating it," she said.

As a consequence, Ms. Parmar said, women are missing out in an industry that is changing the world, paying handsomely and growing.

Britain's technology sector is 20 percent female, according to Eurostat, the statistics agency; Ms. Parmar cites a figure of 17 percent. Neither is far off the European Union average of 21.8 percent, or the United States' rate of 24 percent of technology jobs held by women, down from 36 percent in 1991, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Girls take just 8 percent of Britain's computer science A-levels, the exam that leads to university studies, Little Miss Geek reports. In the United States, 19 percent of high school Advanced Placement test-takers are girls, the Colorado center says.

Ms. Parmar traces the problem partly to image. When her team asked children to draw a person who worked in technology, all sketched men, often geeky and disheveled.

Ms. Parmar believes some companies condescend to female customers with pink devices, and offend them with bikini-clad models at technology shows. "The technology industry is 30 years behind the car industry" in interaction with women, she said.

When they do enroll in computer classes, pre-adolescent and teenage girls often find they are the only girls in the room.

"Even girls that are doing well at math, they opt out. They just want to belong," said Marina Larios, president of the European Association for Women in Science, Engineering & Technology.

Little Miss Geek runs school workshops and gets women from the industry to talk to students. Ms. Parmar hopes to secure corporate sponsorship to expand the effort with coding clubs for girls and more classroom sessions.

Some East European and Baltic countries do better than the West. Latvia has the highest proportion of women in programming in Europe, at 33 percent, while Romania has 30.6 percent, according to Eurostat.

That is a legacy of communism, which espoused gender equality, training women as technicians and engineers, Ms. Larios said. Now, "the numbers are declining, and they're finding the same challenges we're finding."

In the developing world, the problem is more severe, said Nigel Chapman, chief executive of the development group Plan International. Many girls lack access to technology.

Without computer skills, he said, "they are shut out from one of the weapons to fight poverty."

Ms. Parmar sees another opportunity. "Who knows what the devices would be like if women were creating them?" she said. "I'm excited about the future of technology, and I want girls to be a part of it."

The New York Times

(China Daily 03/17/2013 page9)