from the acm-w chair
DOI:10.1145/3056417
Valerie Barr
Gender Diversity in Computing:
Are We Making Any Progress?
RECENTLY I CAME across notes for a talk I gave in 1991 about women and computer science. It was depressing to read through it. Change the
date and I could give the same talk today. How can that be? Hasn’t the situation for women in computer science
improved in the last 26 years? The
answer to that question depends on
what measure(s) you choose.
Yes, there are more women enrolling
in and staying in computer science degree programs, but we should not overstate the improvement. All U.S. academic degree data must be analyzed against
a significant shift in the overall undergraduate pool. From 1966 to 2015, the
U.S. undergraduate population shifted
from 42% to 57% women, requiring that
we be very careful with how we evaluate
disciplinary data. Published analyses
of degree production in CS always state
that 37% of CS degrees went to women
in 1984, and only 18% in 2015. Consider
a different perspective. In 1984, 2.42%
of all women’s degrees were earned in
CS (the high point was actually 2.97% of
women’s degrees in 1986).
During 1989–2006, between 1% and
2% of women’s degrees were earned in
CS, and since then it has been less than
1% each year. For comparison, 6% of
men’s degrees were earned in CS in 2015.
What about jobs? Yes, lots of women
are being hired into tech. The exhibition hall at the Grace Hopper Conference and the career fairs at the ACM
Celebrations of Women in Computing are full of companies eager to talk
with student attendees and line up new
hires. But, again, we have to temper excitement at these developments. While
women are heading in the front doors of
companies, they are hemorrhaging out
the side and back doors. Approximately
45% of women entering tech leave within
five years while only 17% of men leave.
Bringing more women into tech has
not succeeded in changing the climate
there, nor apparently led to significant
changes in the attitudes and behavior
of many people who work in tech. There
are other efforts being made, such as
providing employees with training on
implicit bias, and carrying out large-scale salary review to ensure that wages
are equitable across job titles.
But attitudinal change is slow.
It is time to ask how ACM, a membership organization that reaches millions of people every year, can contribute to efforts to make people aware of
bias and to encourage them to change
their attitudes and behavior. For years
ACM has supported ACM-W, the Council on Women in Computing. Thanks
to ACM’s support, and additional funding from Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, today we have 30 Celebrations of
Women in Computing worldwide, over
160 ACM-W Chapters, and we annually award over $35,000 in scholarships
for women CS students to attend research conferences. These efforts have
great impact on the women involved,
but little broader impact on the ACM
membership. What can ACM do to ad-
dress issues of diversity in ways that will
reach broadly across the membership?
In an exciting development, the
ACM Executive Committee last June
authorized the establishment of a
working group that will formulate the
charter for a new ACM Council on Diversity and Inclusion (CDI). The working group met in January 2017, and the
new Council should launch at the start
of the next fiscal year, July 1, 2017. No
single group can possibly address all
aspects of diversity and inclusion, particularly when we consider that ACM is a
global organization. The CDI will foster
the development of new committees,
created by groups of ACM members
who are passionate about particular
diversity areas. This will enable ACM to,
for example, improve our understanding
of what diversity and inclusion issues
are around the world, address LGBTQ
issues, and address access as an issue
for members and for those wishing to
participate in ACM-sponsored events,
not just as a research topic.
While women are
heading in the front
doors of companies,
they are hemorrhaging
out the side and
back doors.
The working group has started to address the overarching question of what
the role is of a membership organization
in addressing issues of diversity and inclusion. In what ways can ACM contribute to making tech (both industry and
academia) a more hospitable environment for all who are interested in the
field? ACM-W has expanded our work
considerably in the last five years, including increasing our collaborations with
other organizations. We commit to help
in whatever ways we can as ACM extends
and increases its organizational commitment to diversity in computing.
Valerie Barr, a CS professor at Union College,
Schenectady, NY, is chair of ACM’s Council on Women in
Computing, ACM-W.
Copyright held by author.
