“Cheap labor is not high on the list,” Dr. Lazowska said. “It is access to talent.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for computer scientists in the United States will only increase in coming years, Dr. Cuny said. “If you look at the demographics of the country, if we are not going to get our new professionals from women and minorities and persons with disabilities, we are not going to have enough.”

The big problems, these and other experts say, are prevailing images of what computer science is and who can do it.

“The nerd factor is huge,” Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.

This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. “They think of it as programming,” Dr. Cuny said. “They don’t think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth.”

Like others in the field, Dr. Cuny speaks almost lyrically about the intellectual challenge of applying the study of cognition and the tools of computation to medicine, ecology, law, chemistry — virtually any kind of human endeavor.

“The use of computers in modern life is totally ubiquitous,” said Barbara G. Ryder, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University. “So there are niches all over for people who understand what the technology can do and also for people who want to advance the technology.

“But students don’t see that,” Dr. Ryder said. “And it seems to be happening more with the women than with the men.”