Communications of the ACM

benefit of all students. CMU, with its School of Computer Science and the seven departments within the school, offers a wide variety of courses—some of which are applications focused— but the core CS curriculum and a wide variety of advanced courses have become increasingly theory driven and rigorous without impacting students’ retention and success.

Cultural Change Is Key—And
It Can Change at the Micro Level

In 1999, CMU dropped the program-ming/CS background requirement from the admissions criteria and added leadership potential while keeping high SAT scores, particularly in math and science. Dropping this requirement was prompted by a valuable finding from the 1995–1999 research studies. 11 Various entry levels into the first-year courses were created for students with little to no background. Other major contributing factors included: CMU Dean Raj Reddy’s vision to produce leaders in the field that also brought institutional support for change; Lenore Blum joined the CS faculty bringing long-standing expertise and advocacy for women in science and math; and the development of Women@SCS, an organization of faculty and students (mostly, but not all, women) led by a Student Advisory Committee, working to ensure that the professional experiences and social opportunities for women reflect the implicit opportunities for those in the majority (see https://www.women. cs.cmu.edu/).

These changes brought in many
more women, and more students—
both male and female—with a broader
range of characteristics and interests.
We started to see a more balanced
student body, balanced in terms of
gender, of student characteristics,
and balanced in terms of leveling-the-
playing-field opportunities for women
throughWomen@SCS.Int his more
balanced environment our observa-
tions and series of studies, including
our 2016–2017 study, 3–7 found CMU
students relating to CS through a spec-
trum of attitudes along with many
more similarities than differences.
For example, we found most students
(men and women) have a deep inter-
est in computer science and want to
successful in CS we needed to change
the culture and environment, and de-
velop and sustain programs that work
to level the playing field without mak-
ing women feel like a separate species.
However, we did not need to change
the curriculum to be “pink” in any way.
Indeed, gender difference approaches,
which tend to assume CS should be
changed to suit women’s presumed in-
terests, have not provided satisfactory
explanations for the low participation
of women in CS. Indeed, beliefs in a
gender divide may actually be deter-
ring women from seeing themselves in
male-dominated fields.

We hope the CMU story can help
challenge the gender divide in CS, show
that women can master this field suc-
cessfully, and inspire others to think
more broadly about intellectual and ac-
ademic expectations. We acknowledge
that the CMU experience may not be
fully generalizable. For example, CMU
is a private institution that may not
have some of the constraints state in-
stitutions have because of various laws
and regulations. While recognizing the
potentially limited generalizability of
our experiences, we summarize five key
takeaways we believe may be replicated
at other institutions where there is the
motivation for change.

Women Do Not Need a Female-Friendly Curriculum From 1999 onward some dramatic changes occurred at CMU, changes that contributed to a successful and much-improved undergraduate experience for students in the CS major. Most significantly these changes led from women feeling out of place and small in number to being well represented, being an integral part of the CS culture, contributing to the culture, and being successful in the field alongside their male peers. Indeed, men and women graduate at the same rate. This success occurred without compromises to academic integrity, without changing the curriculum to suit women, nor by accommodating what are perceived to be “women’s” learning styles and attitudes to CS. Changes to the CMU curriculum, as in any department committed to providing the best academic program possible are made for the

First-year enrollment by gender (rounded to the nearest full number).

Year Enrolled Male Male Female Female 2010 143 106 74% 37 26% 2011 152 104 68% 48 32% 2012 127 89 70% 38 30% 2013 136 89 65% 47 35% 2014 138 82 59% 56 41% 2015 147 101 69% 46 31% 2016 166 86 52% 80 48% 2017 205 103 50% 102 50% 2018 211 106 50% 105 50% Percentage of male and female first-year students by year of enrollment.