[...] Today, Souvaine chairs the Tufts University computer science department, which has more female professors than male. But few younger women have followed in her generation's footsteps. Next spring, when 22 computer science graduates accept their Tufts diplomas, only four will be women. Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. [...] When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist.[...]The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant...