Google job a win for the girls

Jojo Stewart has managed to edge out the boys in the male-dominated field of computer science.

The second-year Waikato University computer science and biology student has landed a 12-week, fully-paid summer internship with internet company Google in its Sydney office.

"I went to a Google event at uni earlier this year and was talking to one of the girls there and she got in contact with me after the event and said, 'hey, I think you should apply for this internship because I think you'd be good at it', so I applied and got it," Miss Stewart said.

But it wasn't that easy. The 20-year-old had to go through a rigorous interview process, which included everything from why she should work at Google to technical questions about coding.

"It was crazy. I was very overwhelmed."

However, despite being one of two to land the internship, she's not keen to rub it in to her male colleagues too much.

"Definitely, it is very male-dominated, unfortunately. I remember when all the students signed up [to do a pre-university computer science course], we got together at the university ... and I remember getting there and thinking 'wow, there's no girls here'. There was maybe two girls out of 30 or 40 people that showed up. And since then it's kind of been the same. There's definitely more males than females in my [computer science] papers."

Miss Stewart became interested in computer science during her last year at Hamilton's Waikato Diocesan School for Girls when she completed the pre-university paper.

She works with her tutor, Nilesh Kanji, to try to increase awareness of computer science in young girls and the pair tutor a group called the IT Girls, made up of students from her old school.

"It would be great to see more young women in the computer labs in the future."

And her family also sees the benefits of Miss Stewart's skills.

"I'm always getting phone calls saying 'something's gone wrong, come and fix it'."