We’ve heard a lot about adolescent girls showing less interest than boys in technology studies and about the dearth of women in tech industries; but in the United States, women were among the vanguard of programmers in the early days of computing. What happened? We talk with Francesca Borgonovi, a senior education analyst, and Luca Marcolin, an economist, both at the OECD, about why girls shy away from tech studies, why careers in technology are not attractive to more women, and what can be done to improve the gender balance in the tech world.