“Um, this is 61C section.”

Those were the words Alex Dotterweich heard when she walked into the first meeting of her computer science class. A male student stared at her, puzzled, assuming she had walked into the wrong room.

Dotterweich, a senior cognitive science major, can’t help but think the comment had something to do with her appearance. She’s a classically trained ballerina with long blonde hair and a penchant for floral skirts — and she’s one of very few women in her computer science classes.

Last year, 89 percent of degrees awarded in electrical engineering and computer science went to male students. That’s the highest proportion of male graduates of any undergraduate degree.

Dotterweich’s high school didn’t offer computer science. When she started at UC Berkeley, she thought she might major in English, but in her first semester she took an introductory computer science course and discovered an interest in artificial intelligence.

“I really liked CS,” Dotterweich said. “But as I went along, there were not a lot of people like me in those classes.”

After the arduous introductory series of classes, she missed the GPA cutoff to declare the computer science major by a small margin. Frustrated — but undeterred — she plans to graduate with a computer science minor instead.

To declare the computer science major, students must earn a 3.3 GPA in three introductory courses. In the 2015 fall semester, however, the average GPA in those classes was 3.12. To be ordinary in these courses is not quite good enough.

The EECS major in the College of Engineering and the computer science major in the College of Letters and Science are two of the most competitive degrees on campus. They are also two of the majors with the smallest proportion of female graduates.

This situation has not gone unnoticed by the administration. The campus computer science department has dedicated resources and attention to improving the experience for female computer science students. It’s also trying to broaden access to computer science for students of all majors. Yet some find that the everyday experience of being a female undergraduate in UC Berkeley’s computer science program can be alienating.