IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013 - 27

By
HeatHer Wax

Making It All Compute

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."
It might come as a surprise that in Egypt, where Youseff was born and
grew up, computer science is actually seen as a discipline well suited to
women. There aren't "the same kind of cultural barriers that I have
encountered here in the U.S. in terms of encouraging women to
pursue computer science and to pursue other scientific fields,"
she says. "Computer science and software engineering is seen
more as a women-friendly area of work because basically you
Busting
don't have to be in the field, you don't have to work outside, it
cuLturaL
doesn't require as much muscular power or physical strength
Barriers from
as other engineering fields. So it's actually perceived in the
egypt to the
completely other way as over here."
united
states
Youseff took an interest in computers early on. When she was
eight years old, her father brought home a new computer-an
MSX that had only a few games and programs. After "spending time
playing the different preloaded video games and basic paint, I started
wondering about that blue screen that can accept random language," she
recalls. She looked in the user manual, the only computer
©Can StoCk Photo/hali
science book they had in the house, and figured out that the
blue screen was a basic editor, where she could write very basic
computer programs.
But she had no clue where to start, she says, so she copied
programs from the manual at first-to draw figures, design
a simple calculator, change the font and color-and then
began making changes, experimenting with the programming language. "This made me more fascinated by computing, by the fact that we can instruct a computer to do something for us through programming, and I wanted to discover this
Lamia Youseff
more," Youseff says. With her brother, she took a handful of classes
in MS-DOS and Windows, and before long, she had developed a
fascination with software.
Her father, a physician, pushed her to go into medicine so that they could work together,
but she was certain she wanted to study engineering. "That was a little bit of a beginning of
a back and forth between me and him, until he was sure that this is what I wanted to go for
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2013.2280391
and this is what I enjoy doing," says Youseff, but he "was very supportive afterward." She
Date of publication: 11 November 2013

DECEMBER 2013

iEEE womEn in EnginEEring magazinE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2013