One of the reasons so few women work in tech is that few choose to study computer science or engineering. Only 18 percent of computer science graduates in the United States are women, down from 37 percent in 1985.
At a few top college programs, though, that appears to be changing.
At Carnegie Mellon University, 40 percent of incoming freshmen to the School of Computer Science are women, the largest group ever. At the University of Washington, another technology powerhouse, women earned 30 percent of computer science degrees this year. At Harvey Mudd College, 40 percent of computer science majors are women, and this year, women represented more than half of the engineering graduates for the first time.
These examples provide a road map for how colleges can help produce a more diverse group of computer science graduates. They also help answer a controversial question: Does the substance of computer science instruction need to be adjusted to attract women, or does recruitment and mentorship? It's an important question because tech companies have so many jobs to fill, and because computer science skills have become necessary in almost every other industry, too.
So how have these colleges changed the ratio?
One factor is that more students of both sexes are choosing to major in computer science. That's simply because they see plentiful jobs, the applicability to many professions and the attention tech is receiving in the business pages and in pop culture.
But at the colleges with the most significant increases in female majors and graduates, there is more going on.
The University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon, along with other interested parties like Google, have programs to train high school teachers to teach computer science and host camps and mentoring sessions for young students. The programs are not all gender-specific, but end up recruiting girls because they are less likely to pursue technology classes otherwise, said Lenore Blum, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon.
Harvey Mudd revised its recruiting brochures to show photos of women, and it hired women as campus tour guides. 'We made it very clear that being a female scientist, that's normal,' Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd, said Tuesday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo.
Carnegie Mellon observed that when women are a minority in the major, they are disadvantaged because men have informal support, like asking a fraternity brother for help on an assignment or advice on an internship. So the university started formal programs such as one for female computer science majors to mentor younger women. The university also eliminated programming experience as an admissions criterion, which opened the door to girls who have not been exposed to it.
'I don't think we're doing anything that nobody else could do, but it has to be sustained and institutionalized,' Ms. Blum said.
Some of the colleges recast their programs to try to appeal to a broader group of people.
The University of Washington revamped its introductory course - women now make up 37 percent of the class - to emphasize the creative and real-world applications of computer science, said Ed Lazowska, a computer science and engineering professor there. Now, nearly 60 percent of the women who become computer science majors at the university say they did not intend to take that major when they enrolled in the introductory course. (That's compared with only 15 percent of men.)
Harvey Mudd also recast its courses to 'frame engineering and computer science as creative problem-solving, not hard-core programming,' Ms. Klawe said.
But Carnegie Mellon has made a point of not changing its courses, Ms. Blum said. She disagrees with one commonly held stereotype - that women care more about the real-world applications of technology, while men care more about computer programming. Several studies done in the 1990s at Carnegie Mellon backed up that theory, but Ms. Blum said that it isn't true and that it's unfair to both men and women.
The earlier studies were most likely skewed by the tiny number of women in the major, she said. As Carnegie Mellon's program has grown, she and Carol Frieze, another computer science professor at the university who studies diversity in the field, redid the studies and found no gender differences.
'We saw some women like applications and some guys like applications and some dream in code, but most people have a mix,' Ms. Blum said. 'So we're saying very strongly we're not changing our curriculum; we don't do anything special for women.'
This summer, for the first time, several Silicon Valley companies published numbers about the demographic makeup of their employees, which revealed that a startlingly small percentage were women - 17 percent of technical employees at Google and 15 percen t at Facebook, for instance.
The contributing factors are many, including a culture inside companies that makes women feel unwelcome. But one reason is that if just 18 percent of computer science graduates are women, there are only so many women with the qualifications to work in technical jobs. If colleges can produce more of them, the next move will belong to the companies who are hiring.
Entities 0 Name: Carnegie Mellon Count: 6 1 Name: Blum Count: 4 2 Name: Harvey Mudd Count: 3 3 Name: University of Washington Count: 3 4 Name: Google Count: 2 5 Name: United States Count: 1 6 Name: Aspen Count: 1 7 Name: School of Computer Science Count: 1 8 Name: Harvey Mudd College Count: 1 9 Name: Klawe Count: 1 10 Name: Carol Frieze Count: 1 11 Name: Carnegie Mellon University Count: 1 12 Name: Colo. Count: 1 13 Name: Silicon Valley Count: 1 14 Name: Maria Klawe Count: 1 15 Name: Ed Lazowska Count: 1 16 Name: Lenore Blum Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1oUOIaW Title: The Amazing Cold War Advocates for Women in Science Description: In researching the history of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search a few years ago, I happened upon some amazingly gender-stereotyped publicity photographs of young female contestants in the 1950s. The girls-who had jumped a rigorous series of academic hurdles on the way to the national science talent competition-had been photographed...
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