Abstract
This chapter addresses the issue of what makes for a successful higher education program to attract women into a science or technology department. The first section describes the characteristics of a successful program for attracting women into its STEM education programs, based on the research of social scientists Mary Frank Fox and Gerhard Sonnert. The next section, based on the work of education professor Frances Stage and her colleague Steven Hubbard, identify colleges and universities that have done the best job of attracting women into science and technology education. The final section, based on oral histories with participants as well as a wide public literature, provides case studies of departments that have been successful at recruiting and retaining women. These include the general engineering major at Olin College, both the engineering and computer science department at Smith College, the combined department of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, and the computer science departments at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvey Mudd College. More abbreviated accounts are given of computer science at Bryn Mawr, Mills, and Wellesley Colleges, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Georgia Tech.
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Notes
- 1.
Fox had written an earlier paper (Fox 2000) about doctoral education for women in the STEM disciplines. It presaged but did not have as advanced a level of analysis as Fox et al. (2009, 2011). On the complexities of theory and practice related to programs for women graduate students in science and technology, see Fox (1998).
- 2.
Fox et al. (2009) make this astute remark: “The distinction between individualistic and institutional/structural perspectives or explanations for the status of women in science and engineering is important. This is because a long-standing and controversial debate exists about the extent to which it is the women or the social systems of education and work that need to be ‘fixed’ to improve the participation and performance of women in these fields… Further, although social scientists who have studied the phenomenon have tended increasingly to lean to the structural perspective, natural scientists and engineers themselves typically leave unexamined the structures in which students are educated (and work), and expect students to ‘shape themselves’ to prevailing environments…”
- 3.
This material is based on interviews with program directors and others from the five programs with the most successful outcomes and the five programs with the least successful outcomes in undergraduate degrees awarded to women in science and engineering, out of the 49 programs that the authors studied. The 49 programs were all of the ones that the authors could identify for undergraduate programs in science and engineering in the United States.
- 4.
Actually, at the time that Humphreys met Hawthorn, the latter was still a doctoral student. Hawthorn was one year ahead of Simons in the doctoral program. (Private communication, Barbara Simons , 3 April 2016)
- 5.
Hawthorn (2015) also talked about what she called the “extreme academic elitism” at Berkeley: “the atmosphere was one of extreme academic elitism. It didn’t matter that I was a woman, what mattered was that I had those two kids and needed to get rid of them. I never felt that I was discounted because of my sex. [However,] I felt that I was discounted because I talked like a southerner. And because I didn’t participate in a lot of extracurricular activities. I just couldn’t. Because I don’t have the east coast pedigree that a lot of people do that came in to Cal.”
- 6.
Diane McEntyre , who was an advanced graduate student in the school of education studying computer science education, was a supporter of the early WICSE group. (Private communication from Sheila Humphreys, 2 April 2016)
- 7.
In later years, after the Hawthorn and Simons era, some of the people who had taken an active role in WICSE include Faith Fich of Toronto, Dana Randall of Georgia Tech, and Valerie Taylor of Texas A&M and the founder of CMD-IT (see Chapter 9), Amy Wendt who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin -Madison, Dawn Tibury who is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, and Daisy Wang who is a professor in the CISE department at the University of Florida.
- 8.
Similarly, WICSE did not have much to do with the general women’s movement, which was heating up during this same time period. As Simons (2015) noted: “Like with the women’s movement, I think that there was some hostility towards the whole, how can I put it, the stereotypical engineer. They had hostility because they didn’t understand it. It goes both ways. I think that there’s a problem with people who go into engineering science in that many of them are not well balanced educationally. They tend to have a very narrow, and sometimes [have a] quite warped view of the world because they [are] focused so much on the particular discipline that they’re in. It goes both ways. But, to me I was coming at it as someone coming out of computer science and math and interacting with women, many of whom were math-phobic and therefore were hostile. We had nothing to do with the national women’s movement; nothing, absolutely nothing.”
- 9.
Over the years, WICSE has organized six major conferences concerning opportunities or barriers associated with women in computer science and electrical engineering and has held WICSE reunion symposia for the 10th, 20th, 25th, and 30th anniversary’s of the group’s founding. As a result of the first conference, attendance and activity within WICSE grew rapidly, even though that was not the intended purpose of the conference. (Simon s 2015)
- 10.
In the period 1970–2000, there were fewer women by percentage in engineering than there were in computer science. In one way, it makes sense to lump all of engineering together because they were typically lumped together organizationally and financially within the university. However, there are significant variations by percentage in female enrollments by particular engineering discipline. Typically, biomedical, chemical, and civil engineering have had greater percentages of female students at the undergraduate level than computer science, while mechanical and electrical engineering have been lower. See the National Center for Education Statistics for details.
- 11.
Hawthorn and Simons called this phenomenon the “Engineeringification of Computer Science” and they attributed it to the move of the CS program into the engineering school and a move to add more admission requirements that looked like those in other engineering departments. (Hawthorn 2015)
- 12.
Hawthorn (2015) amplifies on this issue: “[S]o I started asking questions, and asked to do a study. And I actually got the cooperation of the Computer Science Department to try to find out why women who had been accepted were not coming. You know what I mean? They’d been accepted but then they decided to go to other schools. …
I did a survey. … I sent out letters to people and got their responses and then presented it to the faculty. And to the women in WICSE. We found that they were not being offered financial aid in the same proportion that men were. … And so, I said, ‘Clearly there’s bias going on here’, which caused … a lot of men in the department [to say], ‘Oh you’re being silly,’ and so forth. But the next year they managed to up the number of women who got financial aid. …
And then later on – Barbara and I spent a long time in graduate school; it took me almost six years to get my PhD and her as well – and we found that while we were in school, … the number of women kept dropping. So we started looking for what was going on with that. And that is when we found that the criteria for admission, as the enrollment pressure went higher, the enrollment criteria for admission was more and more skewed toward lots of math, lots of science, and many women just didn’t have the prerequisites to get in. And in graduate school, a lot of women had not taken Math and Science kinds of undergraduate degrees and couldn’t get into graduate programs. So that’s when we started the re-entry program…”
Hawthorn remembers that Martin Graham and Eugene Lawler on the faculty were particularly supportive of Hawthorn’s concerns; however, most of the faculty were neutral on these issues of broadening participation. As Hawthorn (2015) remembers: “most of them just wanted to get the research done and just wanted to get the work done and didn’t care what sex you were. What your orientation was, what color you were. The only thing was, did you get results, are you working hard on my research project? And so I know that my own advisor, Mike Stonebraker was lightly discouraging about participating in things like that because I already had these two kids and I already had enough to do, and don’t you have enough to do that you don’t need to be taking on that kind of stuff. And I know that another, I think the department head, even, at the time, said, ‘This is not anything that you’ll ever be able to put on your CV. Why are you wasting your time on it?’. You know, those kinds of things. Which honestly, I think is an understandable reaction. When you’re talking about this selective group of people who are really just trying to get world-class research done, and that is their focus.”
- 13.
The Berkeley re-entry program was not unlike an NSF program funded several years earlier, but lasting only a few years, called the Career Facilitation Program. The plan offered promising women students who had interrupted their education a chance to catch up on their education at 17 universities and then enter the labor force. However, one major difference was that the Berkeley program was more focused on women obtaining advanced degrees, while the NSF program was more focused on women entering the technical workforce. (Humphreys 2015; Simons, private communication 3 April 2016)
- 14.
Others who were supportive of the computer science re-entry program included Professor Thelma Estrin at UCLA and Fran Allen at IBM. Dean Pister, who was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, brought various female members of the National Academy to the Berkeley campus to lecture and serve as visiting professors; and this helped to enhance the climate for women in engineering at Berkeley. (Humphreys 2015)
- 15.
Two examples of students who were served by the re-entry program are Nina Amenta , who had received an undergraduate degree in classics at Yale and is now the chair of computer science at University of California, Davis; and Diane Greene , who had studied naval architecture and became the founder and CEO of VMware .
- 16.
There had been an unfortunate case of a female student in the Berkeley CS program in Hawthorn’s first year (thus occurring before Simons arrived at Berkeley) who was unable to handle the academic pressure and dropped out. This had a bearing on the design of the re-entry program. As Simons (2015) remembers: “[T]hat event had a real impact on Paula, … We wanted to make damned sure that people were qualified. … [T]he whole reason … for doing a re-entry program was to make sure that women were qualified to go to graduate school, because we didn’t want a repeat of somebody being admitted because they felt they should get some women [but] who wasn’t qualified. That’s bad on all counts. It’s not fair to the person. It reinforces negative stereotypes of women’s capabilities and so on. We definitely wanted to make sure that … [the re-entry program] would be preparing students to be successful in graduate school.”
- 17.
Because the program did not lead to a degree or a certificate, it was regarded as unusual and it took more than a year to get official approval for the re-entry program. It would have been easier to have established this as a regular set of special courses in the UC Extension program, but that would have had certain disadvantages: “[W]e wanted to get these women into classes with regular students, rubbing shoulders with regular students so that the professors could see them, could experience them, could see whether these were good enough to go into graduate schools and become part of their research teams. But also so that the women themselves could see what that is like. You know? And so it was important to us not to have special programs that they were special students. But they were in regular classes.” (Hawthorn 2015)
- 18.
Humphreys (2015) elaborated on the design of the program: “in this period, computer science classes were highly sought after. It was hard to get into the computer science classes. Berkeley is a public university. Obtaining a second bachelor’s degree was not and is not something, I think, the legislature approved [of]. Everybody is entitled to one bachelor’s degree. No more. We had to set it up either as a graduate program or as an undergraduate program, and we really couldn’t do that. We set it up as an in-between program and that is rather unique. Students did not get a degree; they got an education. They got an accelerated education that replicated a set of upper division computer science courses plus discrete math if they needed it, and advising from CS faculty. Thus, they got letters of recommendation for graduate school. They would get access into the classes, which was very difficult at the time. The faculty agreed to that in the spirit of increasing diversity. They really changed the culture of the department by exposing faculty to a non-standard student, which was unusual at the time.”
- 19.
This continued industrial support to Berkeley for women in the STEM disciplines. Earlier, under Dean Ernest Kuh , Ford and General Motors had provided funding to initiate programs to recruit women students into engineering. (Private communication, Sheila Humphreys, 2 April 2016)
- 20.
Humphreys (2015, slightly revised by Humphreys 2 April 2016) did note that: “Proposition 209 allowed for consideration of socioeconomic disadvantage and disability and other criteria, which are often overlapped with some of these candidates who increase diversity.” There was also a way for the department to get around Proposition 209 through their industrial partners, as Humphreys noted: “In the ‘90s, for example, we had a lot of support from Intel for programs … but direct support to the department for programs to help women and programs to help minorities. And Cisco in particular started a scholarship program, which was very useful after Proposition 209 … was that they gave us scholarships to award to incoming freshman minorities and women, which we kind of directly do based on gender and ethnicity …. We made this information about the scholarship available to admitted applicants and they applied directly to Cisco, which chose the students; which is something that we couldn’t do, but which Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, everybody else who’s private can engage in that kind of financial aid.
- 21.
Dan Garcia , a Hispanic who studied at Berkeley and MIT, is a member of the faculty as a long-term lecturer. His project (Beauty and Joy of Computing) in reforming the large, introductory computer science courses has received national attention for attracting a broad collection of students to computer science at the undergraduate level. (See Aspray 2016 for further discussion of this program.) Another program, which started in 1991 and continues today that is intended to interest undergraduates in computing, is called Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research at Berkeley (SUPERB), funded by NSF’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. Gary May , a Berkeley graduate who is now the dean of engineering at Georgia Tech, has replicated the SUPERB program there (called SUPREME).
- 22.
- 23.
On Carnegie Mellon’s women in computing group, see Frieze and Blum (2002). Blum, who organized the women’s group in computer science at Carnegie Mellon, is the same person who had earlier initiated the program at Mills College, as described above. The typical story told about Carnegie Mellon’s success in increasing the number of women students perhaps underplays the importance of the knowledge that Blum brought with her when she relocated at Carnegie Mellon.
- 24.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the NSF called for changes in engineering education that included “a shift from disciplinary thinking to interdisciplinary approaches, increased development of communication and teaming skills, and emphasis on engineering practice and design throughout the curriculum.” (Stolk and Spence 2003) For a review of NSF programs to reform undergraduate engineering education, see Shipp et al. (2009).
- 25.
This account of Olin College is based on Thys (2014); Rubin (2006); Anonymous (1997); Stolk and Spence (2003); Sanoff (2000); and the Olin College website (www.olin.edu).
Franklin Olin was a civil engineer and professional baseball player who amassed a fortune through his eponymous corporation. From the formation of his foundation in 1938 until 1997, the foundation built buildings on more than 50 university campuses. The trustees then decided to put all their funding into the founding of a new college, which they supported with a grant of $460 million.
- 26.
- 27.
The Olin faculty intentionally use the term “computing” rather than “computer science” when talking about their curriculum. While their degree program is ABET-accredited, it is accredited as an engineering degree program, not as a computer science and engineering program. ( Stein 2015) They differentiate the course of instruction they offer from a traditional computer science undergraduate major. The goal of the Olin faculty is to provide a compressed version of all the fundamental ideas of computer science so that their students have enough foundational knowledge to learn the remainder of the standard computer science core curriculum. (See Downey and Stein 2006.)
- 28.
For example, Lynn Andrea Stein, a member of the original faulty and the first computer scientist hired, was encouraged by her department head at MIT to accept the Olin offer, saying “It’s not a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Opportunities like this don’t come along nearly that often.” ( Stein 2015) Stein, who had already been very active in computer education, including some of the earliest use of robotics for educational purposes, was attracted by the opportunity of a “clean slate” to rethink undergraduate education. At MIT, she had been especially excited by her research on the philosophy of computing, to try to find the central models of the computing field. This research did not particularly interest her MIT colleagues; they were instead much more interested in narrowly focused areas of artificial intelligence research. She felt she might have a better chance to engage these broader, more fundamental questions in a setting such as Olin. Stein’s only concern was that Olin would turn out to be mediocre, which is no longer a concern ten years later.
- 29.
Stein (2015) notes that Olin pays attention to diversity in its admission. It has done well in having the student body about equally male and female, which is a higher percentage of female engineering students at any program except Smith, which is all women. Olin’s racial-ethnic diversity numbers are about average for undergraduate engineering programs in the United States overall – although there is continuing interest in improving this diversity.
The Olin faculty has learned that having equal numbers of men and women in the classroom has in itself not solved all the gender issues: “we have many of the same issues of gender dynamics that you find elsewhere, including female students who believe, and sometimes are told by students or outsiders, that they were only admitted because they were female, which by the way is definitely not true.” The faculty began to talk explicitly with the students about these issues, and they found that this explicit talk can be “very empowering for the students.” The faculty discuss with the students the impact it has when a female student receives the remark “Really, you’re an engineer?” This leads them to talk about biases: “not biases that come out of wanting to be unjust but biases in the sense of tilt. Things that aren’t level. We do think computer scientists look like Mark Zuckerberg , not like me [the female student]. What are the implications of that? Part of the implication is that the experience of being a female computer scientist is quite different from the experience of being a male computer scientist. Just knowing that fact is a first step towards mitigating the potentially negative impact…” ( Stein 2015)
- 30.
It is hard to generalize from the small number of Olin students, but within this small population there have been growing numbers over time of students interested in computing; and while the early student populations of students interested in computing were primarily male, they are now more than half female. ( Stein 2015)
- 31.
- 32.
Only a dozen years before Smith College opened its engineering program, the civil engineer Samuel Florman , well known for his writings about engineering and culture, had visited Smith to participate in a seminar on the role of technology in modern society. Reflecting on that visit, he wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine that gave a class argument about why there were so few women in engineering and why Smith would never have an engineering program: engineering has attracted bright boys from blue collar families; girls from blue-collar families have not been given the educational opportunities as boys; upper-class families “do not esteem a career in engineering”; hence there will not be girls in engineering. ( Florman 1978) There are of course many problems with this argument, as the creation a decade later of a successful engineering program at Smith implies.
Another predecessor was a proposal in 1992 by the anthropologist Barbara Lazarus , the associate provost for academics at Carnegie Mellon and former dean at Wellesley, to create a women’s engineering institute. The idea got some attention at the time in lectures at a WEPAN meeting, several National Academy of Sciences talks, and several other professional meetings; but it was not implemented. Some people were opposed because they believed it would further isolate women in the engineering community. (Emmett 1992)
- 33.
Ruth Simmons was president of Smith College at the time the engineering program was established. She was the first African American to serve as president of any of the elite Seven Sisters colleges. She took an interest in diversity in the STEM disciplines, not only the engineering program, for example supporting a campus organization called Union of Underrepresented Science Students, which focused on retaining students in the STEM disciplines. (Dietz 2001)
- 34.
As the engineering program because established, students used internships, research experiences for undergraduates, and capstone programs to pursue engineering in service to humanity. Smith has a program called Praxis, which guarantees every Smith student a stipend of a few thousand dollars if they want to pursue an unpaid summer internship. The majority of students fulfill their year-long capstone requirement by working through the program’s design clinic, in small teams of three or four students, to work with an industry, government, or nonprofit client on a real-world problem. ( Voss 2015)
- 35.
Grasso had a deep influence on the direction of the program. He hired all of the original engineering faculty members, choosing people who could integrate undergraduate students into research and who appreciated the strengths offered by having the engineering program set in a liberal arts environment. Grasso was an influential voice in discussions of what this program should be. It was not going to be a program that produces “the stereotypical engineer” and teaches its graduates “only to solve the math of [engineering].” ( Voss 2015)
- 36.
Smith’s engineering program was selected in its first year as one of the initial sites for a Virtual Development Center for Anita Borg’s Institute of Women and Technology (now called the Anita Borg Institute). See Chapter 8 for further information about the Virtual Development Centers and the Anita Borg Institute.
- 37.
The facilities of the engineering program were unprepossessing: a temporary building “where [the faculty] had one large open space and… ran all of [their] labs out of it. [They] were constantly putting equipment away and setting equipment back up.” Faculty offices were located in an old house three blocks away. As the faculty expanded, offices were found here and there for them across campus. In 2010 the engineering program became an occupant in a state-of-the-art building (Ford Hall). This move has helped somewhat with the rapid growth in the number of students majoring in engineering over the past 5 years. ( Voss 2015)
- 38.
Much in line with ABET’s learner-centered standards was an influential report from the National Research Council on how people learn (NRC 2000). Learning-centered pedagogy starts with “the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that learners bring to the educational setting.” (from NRC 2000, as quoted in Voss and Ellis 2002). For a discussion of how women-friendly ABET’s EC 2000 education standards are, see Loftus (2003) and Rosser (2001). Voss and Ellis (2002) provides an early example of an attempt to teach an engineering course (circuit theory) using a learner-centered approach. Also see Glazer-Raymo (2008).
- 39.
The current department head, Susan Voss, saw no down side to this curriculum. 80 to 90 % of the engineering majors pursued careers in engineering. The top students were admitted and did well in the top engineering departments; and employers were generally eager to hire the Smith graduates because they had stronger training in communication skills, working with people, thinking about the big picture, and managing projects. These remarks are based on the experience of the almost 300 students who had graduated from Smith with engineering degrees by 2015. ( Voss 2015)
- 40.
The discussion here of the Smith computer science department is based on O’Rourke (2015).
- 41.
At the time Erlinger was hired, Harvey Mudd also did not have a biology department. Biology and computer science developed according to the same approximate schedule in the 1980s and early 1990s. The faculty in the other science and engineering disciplines were nervous about the additions of these two majors because they meant the same budget and same number of students had to be divided up into more parts. (Erlinger 2015) Much of the material for this section on Harvey Mudd is based on Erlinger (2015) and Alvarado (2016), and secondarily on Shellenbarger (2013). However, also see a number of other papers cited below on particular aspects of the departmental change that led to more women enrolling in the major.
- 42.
As Erlinger (2015) explains the absence of computer engineering in the computer science curriculum: “We paid very little lip service to that, and the reason was that the college’s engineering program is a general engineering program, which had … some computer engineering. They were always the strongest department in terms of faculty and students and the least willing to cooperate… There were always some students that found a way to cross over and do a CSE degree by specialization, et cetera. It’s never been real cooperation in that aspect between the two departments. That’s slowly changing now, partly because a lot of historical faculty in engineering are gone and new faculty are asking, why, why is it this way? … Because these students are always self motivated in Mudd a lot of them found a way to do something by working through the two departments. In that sense it’s a little bit different than other places, so we don’t have any hardware labs, for instance, in CS at all. We have a robotics lab, but then that was really it.”
- 43.
Alvarado had studied computer science at Dartmouth and MIT before joining the Harvey Mudd faculty. Her involvement in a newly formed Women’s Technology program at MIT had spurred her interest in both teaching and underrepresentation of women in computing. She was attracted to Harvey Mudd because it had a large computer faculty (10) for a school with a small number of students (700). Moreover, she described the atmosphere as “vibrant”, with “everybody…doing really exciting things.” ( Alvarado 2016)
- 44.
This is in reference to the CS Principles Course that has been created with support from the National Science Foundation and the College Board by a committee led by Owen Astrachan of Duke University and Amy Briggs of Middlebury College. See Aspray (2016) for a history of the development of this course. Alvarado (2016) indicates that the Harvey Mudd introductory course included significantly more programming while still having the same philosophical goals of the CS Principles course.
- 45.
As Alvarado (2016) amplified on the description of the new introductory course: it was a “broad introduction to computer science where we touched on different styles of programming, a little bit of hardware, a little bit of computer science theory. All along the way there were applications to other scientific disciplines that would appeal to … the broad science and engineering base that we have at Harvey Mudd.”
- 46.
Based on preliminary empirical findings, “the data suggest that CS for Scientists succeeds in three ways:
students ‘get’ the importance of CS to their future scientific endeavors and its importance as a stand-alone discipline; students succeed in future CS courses to a greater extent; and they continue studying CS as often – and perhaps more – than from traditional alternatives. In each measure women benefit at least as much as men.” (Dodds et al. 2008)
- 47.
The college is making efforts, but it is not as far along in attracting minority students as it is in attracting women students. “We decided to go to eight hundred from roughly seven hundred students, and part of the discussion of that was to try and make 40 %, roughly, of that eight hundred students of color. That’s starting to happen, the infrastructure’s being created better to support these students … think we’ve expanded our schools that we visit and people that we talk to and we’re starting to see more students of color. That started in roughly 2000, so this is a continuing effort.” (Erlinger 2015)
- 48.
Reflecting on the new introductory course, Erlinger (2015) noted: “The funny thing is that in hindsight when you really look at it, there’s more programming in that course then there was in the original Java course. But, it’s spread out among all these other topics. There’s a lot of short Python programs, some of them are rather large, but they’re much more interesting programs. There’s a lot more interesting material for students. Java class had been ranked among the freshmen as the lowest class in terms of like. This new Python-based class is ranked the highest.”
- 49.
The rationale for sending the students to the Hopper conference were given in the GHC Evaluation and Impact Study that attendance at the conference leads students to feel less isolated, be more committed to CS, and be more inspired. The Mudd faculty informally polled their students who attended the Hopper conference in 2007 and 2008, and in 2009 and 2010 they more formally assessed their students who attended. They found in the more formal analysis that the Hopper conference gave most students a better understanding of both CS and its culture; it increased their desire to take another CS course and become a major; Hopper attendance was positively correlated with taking another CS course (52 % who attended the Hopper conference did take another CS course, compared to 31 % of female students who did not attend the Hopper conference took another CS course. ( Alvarado and Judson 2014) Also see DuBow et al. (2012) and Alvarado (2016).
- 50.
Alvarado et al. (2012) summarized the lessons they had learned in providing research experiences to Mudd undergraduate women as a means to increase their participation in computing: (1) provide open-ended projects with sufficient scaffolding; (2) have the students work in teams, with a mix of experienced and inexperienced students; (3) daily communication and mentoring is important; and (4) broadening participation benefits all students.
- 51.
Alvarado (2016) spoke of the change of culture in the department: “It was very much almost an overnight cultural shift. As you probably know, the numbers went from about thirteen percent women to about forty percent women in the span of about two years. It felt like it went from CS being this place that’s kind of weird for women, a lot of stereotypical geeky guys. Nothing against geeky guys. I love them, but [only as] one kind of student in CS. Then suddenly there were so many different kinds of students in CS, and that was just sort of how it was. Nobody thought that was weird. It just happened. Then when the new students came in, it felt like the norm. … It was almost surprising that the culture shift was such a non-issue. It just sort of happened magically. I reel from that.”
- 52.
Alvarado left Harvey Mudd to take a faculty position at the University of California at San Diego, so she has not witnessed the growth of the various majors; but from while she was there, having three majors, including one with a biological orientation that might be more attractive to women, she stated: “I’m not sure about whether that made a difference. Certainly I think the Bioinformatics or Computational Biology Major, there were more women percentage-wise in that major, but when I left Harvey Mudd, it was still a very small major. There were not many students in that major at all. Then in terms of Math-CS versus the CS, I think it was about the same in terms of the representation of women in both of those majors. I don’t know that the number of majors made that much of a difference.” ( Alvarado 2016)
- 53.
Erlinger (2015) indicates that the male and female students generally tend to get along well: “We don’t have a lot of all-male tables at lunch or projects that are only male. It’s a very mix. There are obviously problems at times among relationships as there is anywhere, but overall, that has not turned out to be an issue. There have been only one or two situations in terms of language and other things over the years that I’ve been involved between a male and a female. Not actually any action, just unhappy with a choice of words.”
- 54.
Erlinger (2015) that the average course load in computer science in terms of number of student contacts is about triple the average for the rest of the college, and that this has caused some stress. However, the good communication has enabled the department to get through this stressful situation without any meltdowns.
- 55.
On his personal experiences as department chair with President Klawe, Erlinger states: “I love Maria, I think she’s fantastic, [but] she’s a complete pain to me because when I go to her and tell her about things I want to do, and can we really do this, her answer always is: ‘Do it. You guys get down there and do it’. … She’s never asked me to do something that’s not right, but she’s really been very supportive [but also] very demanding that we really do do it.
“I think you could have somebody different at top and we would have done some of this, but we would not be where we are. When I wanted to pay for Grace Hopper or other things, I could go and Maria would give me pointers and help me try figure out how to do it. She didn’t always have the money, but we would figure out together how to do it. She’s always been that supportive … The school started [to change] before she got there; I think the department and the school recognized it needed to change. It’s just that she’s kind of turned up the heat and turned up the fire.”
- 56.
Alvarado (2016) has a somewhat different view from Erlinger: “right around the same time in 2006, Maria Klawe joined as President, and she was very excited to hear about things that we had already gotten started on and just threw her support in one hundred percent, with funding, with her connections, with just talking to people, playing it up. That’s why I say it just wouldn’t have been possible without her support. Even though most of the stuff was already underway, she acted as a giant catalyst that got everything moving so quickly.”
- 57.
- 58.
See Aspray (2016) for a discussion of the work of Sheryl Burstahler and Richard Ladner at the University of Washington concerning people with disabilities.
- 59.
- 60.
- 61.
References
Alvarado, Christine. 2016. Oral history interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute Oral History Collection, January 7.
Alvarado, Christine, and Eugene Judson. 2014. Using targeted conferences to recruit women into computer science. Communications of the ACM 57(3): 70–77.
Alvarado, Christine, Zachary Dodds, and Ran Libeskind-Hadas. 2012. Increasing women’s participation in computing at Harvey Mudd College. ACM Inroads 3(4): 55–64.
Anonymous. 1997. Olin College joins list of engineering schools. Civil Engineering, August 23.
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Aspray, W. (2016). Building Educational Infrastructures for Broadening Participation in Computing. In: Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Computing. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24811-0_10
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