the Difference

Many successful programs work to enrich women’s experiences with computing. For example, CRA-W offers a host of professional development programs that spark women’s interest and skills in research careers. In addition to building women’s sense of belonging to a community, mentoring and peer support are hallmarks of programs like ACM-W student chapters, ABI’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the regional Celebrations of Women in Computing, and the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing.

The Pacesetters program is the first of its kind where organizations come together, work across corporate and academic organizational boundaries, and identify effective ways to recruit or retain a specific number of technical women, all within an aggressive timeframe and holding shared accountability to themselves and the public for achieving a common quantifiable goal.

 

how the Program Works Pacesetters combine top-down and bottom-up approaches for progress based on both research findings about organizational change and observations of what works for NCWIT members. 1–6 Each Pacesetters organization must have meaningful participation by executive leaders who work top-down, and change leaders who work bottom-up. Together they build internal teams,

 

Pacesetters organizations include:
˲ aT&T
˲ a TLas institute
˲ Bank of america
˲ Boehringer ingelheim
˲ Cal Poly at san Luis Obispo
˲ Carnegie mellon
˲ Georgia Tech
˲ Google
˲ iBm
˲ indiana University Bloomington
˲ intel
˲ microsoft
˲ Pfizer
˲ Qualcomm
˲ santa Clara University
˲ UC irvine
˲ UC santa Cruz
˲ University of Colorado Boulder
˲ The University of Texas at austin
˲ University of virginia
˲ University of Washington
˲ villanova University
˲ virginia Tech

develop and fund the needed programs, and share their results.

This program design has several advantages. Executive leaders actively engage and can influence people, policy, and resources within the organization, while providing visible endorsement. Change leaders complement these executive efforts by building out an extended team, including people in a variety of key roles across the organization. Together they develop a broadly shared vision that takes into account group norms and specialized knowledge. This results in a set of organizational approaches for collectively reaching a quantified overall goal of more women added to the technical talent pool.

Pacesetters’ approaches include actively recruiting graduate and undergraduate students; retaining them in the major through curricular, pedagogical, and community innovations; developing and raising awareness of mid-career options; and fostering technical innovation by facilitating women’s contributions. For the most part, approaches rest on research-informed promising practices that are tailored to the particular conditions at a Pacesetters organization. Early evaluation shows tangible value in building this type of Pacesetters learning community around a shared and urgent goal (see http://www.ncwit. org/ work.pacesetters.html).

NCWIT hosts annual Pacesetters Roundtables that bring executive leaders face to face with team change leaders from each of the 24 participating organizations for focused working sessions. The momentum generated by the roundtables is further spurred through NCWIT’s leadership visits with each Pacesetters organizations’ executives or deans to discuss their specific approach, leverage NCWIT and other research-based interventions, and encourage an accelerated pace for change.

organizational Results

Pacesetters use innovative change strategies to reach their goal. Some specific examples include:

˲ UT Austin developed an “in-reach”
strategy to target undeclared fresh-
man women already on campus. They
doubled the number of new female
students in one year by requesting 40
slots for focused recruiting, targeting
students from the First Bytes summer
camp, providing faculty and student
mentoring for new freshman women,
and offering NSF scholarships to se-
lected freshmen women.

national Results

Pacesetters set a goal of recruiting or retaining 1,000 technical women in the U.S. computing work force by 2012 and reported 568 Net New Women in May