Communications of the ACM

Bethesda, MD-based SANS Institute.

Paller was pleased that 6,647 girls from 1,000 U.S. schools participated in the competition. Participants performed tasks including cracking codes, plugging security gaps, and creating software tools.

Creating greater gender parity in STEM-oriented professions will take more than improving science education for girls and promoting overall gender equality, according to the 2018 report “The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education.” The study by the journal Psychological Science looked at almost 500,000 adolescents from 67 countries in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the world’s largest educational survey. It found that girls were at least as strong in science and math as boys in 60% of the PISA countries, and that they were capable of college-level STEM studies.

Yet the gender gap in STEM fields persists.

“The generally overlooked issue of
intraindividual differences in academic
competencies and the accompanying
influence on one’s expectancies of the
value of pursuing one type of career
versus another need to be incorporated
into approaches for encouraging more
women to enter the STEM pipeline,”
the study notes. “In particular, high-
achieving girls whose personal academic
strength is science or mathematics
might be especially responsive to S TEM-
related interventions.”
Whether a girl has the desire to be
involved in computer science, encour-
agement and exposure to the field re-
main focal points. In a time when the
#MeToo movement has gained mo-
mentum, the push to empower young
women to feel welcome in computer
science continues as well.

These efforts have gone global. In January, for example, a female coputer engineer and some colleagues created Jiggen Tech Hub, West Africa’s first tech hub for women.

“It’s not about individual women
changing their perspectives or doing
something different,” says Dubow.
“It’s about departments and school
systems and industry and hiring prac-
tices that have to change to make a dif-
ference on this issue.”
ACM-W, ACM’s Council on Wom-
en in Computing, which advocates
internationally for the engagement
of women in all aspects of the com-
puting field, sponsors ACM Celebra-
tions of Women in Computing, pro-
viding monetary and other support
in order to connect women work-
ing/studying in technical fields and
break down feelings of isolation.
The intention of ACM-W in support-
ing these celebrations, says the orga-
nization’s chair, Jodi Tims, is to reach
the broadest possible populations of
women through an international net-
work of self-sustaining small confer-
ences, dovetailing when possible with
ACM-W chapters.
Tims says 87 such Celebrations
have been held since 2013, with a total
10,500 attendees through 2017. She
says attendance has grown from about
1,500 in 2013-2014 to 5,800 for the first
half of this year, and the number of
countries in which Celebrations take
place has grown from five at the outset
to 16 this year.
Tims suggested a variety of things in-
dividuals can do to make certain their
environments are inclusive, such as:
˲ Ensure everyone in a meeting, re-
gardless of gender, have thechance to
contribute to a discussion.
˲ Encourage young women to push
back against negative peer pressure
from both women and men to dissuade
them from staying in computing.
˲ Mentor a female student interest-
ed in computing.
˲ Make certain hiring, tenure, and
promotion committees, as well as
teaching faculty and managers, un-
derstand how unconscious bias can
affect their decisions, and help them
to develop mechanisms that will dis-
rupt those biases.

Tims points out that ACM “has the potential to set the standard for what it means to be an organization committed to solving issues of gender diversity in computing.”

Further Reading

Stoet, G., and Geary, D.C.

The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education, Psychological Science, 2018.

Stout, J.G., and Blaney, J.M.

“But it doesn’t come naturally”: How effort expenditure shapes the benefit of growth mindset on women’s sense of intellectual belonging in computing. Computer Science Education (pp. 1–14), http://bit.ly/2EIZMKP

Blaney, J.M., and Stout, J.G.

Examining the relationship between introductory computing course experiences, self-efficacy, and belonging among first-generation college women.

In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 69–74).

New York, NY: ACM.

Sax, L.J., Zimmerman, H.B., Blaney, J.M., Toven-Lindsey, B., and Lehman, K.J. Diversifying computer science departments: How department chairs become change agents for women and underrepresented minority students. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 23( 2), 101-119. DuBow, W., Farmer, R. Wu, Z., and Fredrickson, M.

Bringing Young Women into Computing through the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Program, Communications of the ACM, December 2013.

Tims, J.L.

Achieving Gender Equity: ACM-W Can’t Do It Alone, Communications of the ACM, February 2018.

Barr., V.

Gender Diversity in Computing: Are We Making Any Progress? Communications of the ACM, April 2017.

Esther Shein is a freelance technology and business writer based in the Boston area.

A study of almost
500,000 adolescents
in 67 countries
found girls were
at least as strong
in science and math
as boys in 60% of
PISA countries,
and were capable
of college-level
STEM studies.