FORTUNE

As recent Twitter campaigns like #ILookLikeAnEngineer have shown, stereotypes are powerful — perhaps especially in high school, where students are quick to pigeonhole each other (and themselves) into cliques like jocks, cheerleaders, brainiacs, computer geeks, and so on. High school also happens to be where people start to think seriously about what they want to do when they grow up. In practical terms, according to new research, that means many teenaged girls who might otherwise consider a career in STEM are turned off by the computer-geek image. A pair of experiments with 270 14-to-18-year-old students in two different high schools shows that three times as many girls were interested in enrolling in a computer science classes if the classroom where it was taught was “less geeky,” the study says. To read further, please visit http://fortune.com/2015/08/25/girls-computer-science/.