of the pipeline when students receive their Ph.D.s. The table here gives some approximate percentages for computer science Ph.D.s, STEM Ph.D.s, and the U.S. population. The computer science numbers, except for disabled, come from the 2008 Taulbee Survey (see http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/ may09/ taulbee.html), the STEM numbers and disabled number for CS come from the 2007 Survey of Earned Doctorates, and the U.S. population numbers come from the 2000 U.S. Census. All numbers are rounded to the nearest full percent.

As indicated in the table, there is underrepresentation at the Ph.D. level by women, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and persons with disabilities. There has been a steady growth in the percentage of women earning Ph.D.s in computer science from the early 1970s from approximately 10% to now just over 20%. By contrast, during the same period the percentage of women earning Ph. D.s in biology rose from less than 10% to now just over 50%.

Broadening Participation Efforts

The lack of women in computer science at all levels has motivated a number of efforts including ACM’s Committee on Women in Computing ( ACM-W), Computer Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), the Anita Borg Foundation for Women and Technology (ABI), and the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). These organizations provide a number of programs at all levels to promote and support the inclusion of more women in the computing field. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brings women in the computing field together every year.

The Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), which is sponsored by ACM, CRA, and IEEE, has the goal to increase the participation of underrepresented minorities in computing. The CDC organizes the Tapia conference every two years.

The ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS) has as one of its missions to “educate the public to support careers for disabled persons.” The AccessCom-

the computing field
cannot continue
to rely on getting
the vast majority
of its high-tech
workers from a few
demographic groups.

puting Alliance (see http://www. washington.edu/accesscomputing) based at the University of Washington is a primary resource for students with disabilities who are interested in computing and for computing departments to make themselves more welcoming for such students. Nevertheless, there is no organization within the major computing organizations (ACM, CRA, and IEEE Computer Society) that advocates for broadening participation for persons with disabilities.

Since 1994, the CRA’s A. Nico Habermann Award has been awarded to people who have “made outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the numbers and/or successes of underrepresented members in the computing research community.” The Super-computer Conference (SC) is the only mainstream conference I know of that includes a section on “Broader Engagement” that is “aimed at increasing the involvement of individuals who have been traditionally underrepresented in the high-performance computing (HPC) field.”

 

Broadening Participation at the national Science Foundation In 2006, the National Science Foundation initiated a new program called Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) within the Division of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). This program funds a small number of alliances and a larger number of demonstration projects. All the projects have the goal of trying to increase the participation and success of underrepresented groups in comput-

ing. Some alliances partner research universities with minority-serving institutions to get more undergraduates involved in research. Some alliances are regional, taking advantage of locality to strengthen the alliance, while others are national, centered around one topic such as robotics or students with disabilities. Demonstration projects are more narrowly focused on developing specific interventions to enthuse and build the capacity of students from underrepresented groups in the computing field. A new initiative in BPC that started this year are the Leveraging, Scaling, or Adapting (LSA) projects where a project does not have to be a new intervention, but can be an existing intervention that has been proven for one group and could be applied to another.

Conclusion

I hope this premiere Broadening Participation has provided some background while suggesting future columns. In this spirit, there have been some very encouraging developments over the past few years. Frances Allen (2006 recipient) and Barbara Liskov (2008 recipient) were the first women to win the ACM Turing Award after the award had been given to 50 men since its inception. The inaugural ACM-Info-sys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences was awarded to a woman, Daphne Koller, in 2007. The Grace Hopper and Tapia conferences are growing and very successful. Broadening participation is beginning to appear as a theme in mainstream conferences, and this column will contribute to calling attention to the importance of this evolving topic in computing.

 

References

1. Greenwald, A.G. and Krieger, L.H. implicit bias:

Scientific foundations. California Law Review 94

(2006), 945–967.

2. Nosek, B.A. et al. National differences in gender-science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievement. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009), 10593–10597.

3. Wulf, W.A. How shall we satisfy the long-term educational needs of engineers? in Proceedings of the IEEE 88, 4 (2000), 593–596.

 

Richard E. Ladner ( [e-mail]) is a Boeing Professor in Computer Science and engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. He is a recipient of the 2004 Presidential Award for excellence in Science, Mathematics, and engineering Mentoring (PAeSMeM), the recipient of the 2008 Computing Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award, and a winner of a 2008 Purpose Prize.