Communications - February 2009

Tech ( www.girlsgotech.org) and Sally Ride Science ( sallyridescience.com) Web sites.

˲ Enroll girls in summer computer programs in which they have immer-sive experiences with technology.

˲ Motivate girls and women through the potential social impact of technology. ²⁹Several excellent programs are built around socially relevant themes and involve teamwork, collaboration, and hands-on learning—pedagogical approaches shown to be highly effective for girls. ¹⁸ The Edge Summer Engineering Workshop for High School Girls, offered yearly by Union College, is a two-week summer residential workshop devoted to this purpose (an- tipasto.union.edu/edge/). Similarly, Purdue University’s Engineering Projects In Community Service (EPICS) program, launched in 1995, is a learning approach in which undergraduate teams come together to apply technology solutions to an identified community problem. While EPICS does not specifically target women, it has significantly enhanced women’s participation in computer science and engineering. ⁷Encouraged by this result, EPICS launched a high-school summer program, based on the same model.

˲ Engage students and faculty of university CS departments to work with local middle schools and high schools while encouraging companies to implement their own outreach programs of this type.

Academia: Attracting and Retaining Students and Faculty. Over more than a decade, a host of initiatives has evolved to increase and sustain the participation of women, at all levels of academia, in computing. Many of these programs are projects of organizations specifically devoted to this purpose— for example, ACM’s Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W),^athe Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI), the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), MentorNet, and the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). Readers are encouraged to visit the organizations’ Web sites for more information.

a For more information on ACM’s efforts to raise the profile and status of women in computing, see http://women.acm.org.

Other such programs have been initiated by funding agencies. These initiatives include the Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers (ADVANCE) grants and the Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as Canada’s NSERC-Industry Chairs for Women in Science and Engineering. (NSERC is the Natural Scienc-

another CS course, and do better in the second CS course. Thus a number of institutions now impose a pair-programming requirement for their introductory CS classes.

˲ Make a computing-related course a requirement, or a highly recommended option, for all students in majors that have many females (arts and education, for example). While introducing a new general-curriculum requirement for a wide range of un-

“today’s computing is not your father’s
computing. interaction design, empirical
studies of user experience, project
management, understanding social impacts
of technology, and much more are new faces
of academic computing. check them out.”

BonnIe a. naRDI: PRofessoR, DonaLD BRen sChooL of InfoRmatIon anD ComPuteR sCIenCe, unIVeRsIt Y of CaLIfoRnIa, IRVIne.

es and Engineering Research Council of Canada.) Still other programs, such as Google’s Anita Borg scholarships and Microsoft’s New Faculty Fellowships, are supported by industry.

At the undergraduate level, three approaches have been the most successful:

˲Redesign “Introduction to CS” courses to emphasize applications in areas of interest to females. Excellent examples of such redesigned courses include those at Georgia Tech and the University of British Columbia (UBC), which respectively emphasize applications in digital media and in psychology, fine arts, and biology. ²⁷Harvey Mudd College and Princeton each redesigned their introductory CS course to focus on science applications. ⁹

˲Require students to do assignments in their introductory CS course using “pair programming,” which provides benefits (demonstrated by research conducted at UC, Santa Cruz¹⁹) for female and male students alike. A result of this approach is that more women are likely to complete the course, obtain a higher grade, take

dergraduate majors is often politically difficult, Arizona State University has managed to do it. Otherwise, as demonstrated at UBC, a simple statement in the undergraduate handbook that “the Dean recommends that all [such] majors take at least one computer science course” can dramatically increase the number of female students taking CS courses.

Some of the successful approaches for attracting and retaining more female computer majors include:

˲ Create or publicize majors that combine computer science with another area. Examples include media computation at Georgia Tech; majors at Cornell cosponsored by the Faculty of Computing and Information Science and either the College of Engineering, the College of Arts and Sciences, or the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; and informatics and business information systems at UC Irvine. At UBC, over a third of the students in double majors involving CS are female.