Re: Opening doors for women in computing
> And one of the things I remember noticing, and discussing with other
> women in my course, was that so many of the men in that course had
> spent the last few years playing with their computers at home, that
> they had the advantage of having encountered most of those concepts
> before even starting the course. [...] This is not "getting
> discouraged because other people are better than you are". It is,
> rather, getting discouraged because most of the people you are
> competing with have years of background, for whatever reason, that
> you lack.
Exactly. I too encountered this, and I'd say that dealing with this
was, for me, the hardest aspect of my undergraduate degree course.
I went to a talk by Lenore Blum of CMU's Women@SCS initiative about a
year ago, in which she mentioned that CMU's significant boost to
percentage of women studying, and sticking with, computer science
(from 8% in 1995 to 41% in 2003) was largely due to two things:
1. Change in admissions criteria: The admissions office was told (by
Allan Fisher, of "Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing") that
prior programming experience was emphatically not a prerequisite for
success in the CS major. Raj Reddy, the then Dean of School of
Computer Science at CMU, suggested that the admissions office develop
criteria that would help select future visionaries and leaders in
CS. The admissions office interpreted this as placing high value on
activities that demonstrated committment to "giving back to the
community." Interestingly, this actually induces a bias in favour
high-school girls.
2. Change in curriculum: Rather than a single entry-point to the CS
degree, multiple ways of enterring the program were created. There
were no other changes to the curriculum.
The underlying aim shared by these actions was to eliminate the
situation you describe, Helen, in which the absence of years of
computing background serves to lower confidence and consequently
interest, resulting in fewer women entering and continuing with
computer science. Perhaps if more universities were to adopt this
principle, then we would see a global increase in women studying
CS-related subjects.
--
hanna m. wallach
blog: http://join-the-dots.org/
work: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/hmw26/
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