How can the U.S. produce more girl geeks?(NEWSWATCH)

Policy-makers should push for all students to take more math and science early on if we want more women geeks, according to a new study done by two women who presented their findings at the 100th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia.

Maria Charles, a sociology professor at the University of California, San Diego, and Karen Bradley, of Western Washington University, analyzed data compiled in 2004 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on higher education degrees awarded in 2001.

They looked at seven fields of study and confirmed that women led in traditionally "female" fields such as education and health and lagged behind in stereotypically masculine fields.

But gender ratios varied a great deal from country to country, the women found. Male overrepresentation in computer science in the Czech Republic is three times more extreme than in Turkey, for example.

"The ubiquity of women's underrepresentation attests to the persistence of deep-seated and widely shared beliefs that men and ...