'Twas a good day. The National Science and Technology Council gave its Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring to CRA-W, for organizing the Grad Cohort for Women. As part of this program, back in February they organized a workshop in Seattle that my organization, Microsoft Research, sponsored. We also had many women researchers from MSR participating in the event (which was a great success, by the way). CRA-W asked Sarah Sterling, who coordinates gender diversity programs for MSR, to join them in Washington, D.C. today for the award ceremony. I'm very proud of Sarah -- she has worked super hard in support of trying to grow the number and stature of women in computing, and it's a privilege to work with her.
This is a cause that I care a lot about, and I have had the good fortune to speak with a lot of people who know a lot more about the topic than I do. Since there has been so much written the last few weeks about this on the blogosphere (this for example, and this) I thought I'd go into a little more depth on the topic and share what I know.
One of the real pioneers in taking on this issue is Carnegie Mellon University. Two CS professors there, Margolis and Fisher, saw the problem and wanted to do some real science to see if they could learn something about the root causes, so they got some funding and did a real study (which they subsequently wrote up and published in a great book called Unlocking the Clubhouse). Specifically, they were studying attrition from the CS program at CMU, and while the lessons they learned can be applied at some level to other contexts such as women in technology industries, there are other issues there too so we need to be careful not to draw conclusions that are too wide. But nevertheless, they were able to draw some clear conclusions.
First, they found that women and men entered CS programs for different reasons. (what I am about to say is a clear overgeneralization and is not true for 100% of men and women, but Fisher and Margolis found it to be true with a large majority) Men got into CS because they wanted to understand how computers work -- the tech equivalent of taking the car engine apart and putting it back together again. Women entered CS because they believed (rightly) that with a CS degree they could have a large impact on the world. The problem, of course, is that particularly for the first couple of years of the CS degree program, the classes, projects and assignments are very focused on "take the engine apart" concepts -- you learn all about how a computer works, piece by piece. That reinforces exactly what the men are looking for, but quickly turns off the women. In fact, when the authors did interviews with women who had either left the CS program or were contemplating leaving, they repeatedly were told that the women had lost interest because they couldn't see the relevance and application of what they were learning.
Second, they discovered that men wee much more comfortable working individually while women desired to work in teams and have a larger support network to discuss and share ideas. Actually, it goes a lot further: in many CS programs, introductory classes are geared towards "weeding out" the lower-end students through heavy workloads and difficult assignments. But it turns out that men are much more comfortable struggling (and sometimes failing) alone, while many women (they found) would jump to the conclusion that they were doing far worse than most of the other students -- even if everyone was struggling.
Armed with this information, Margolis and Fisher introduced some changes to the department. To address the first problem, they re-worked the curriculum, projects and assignments to make them emphasize real-world problems instead of abstract ones. They actually didn't need to make substantial changes to the concepts in the curriculum itself to do this, but the result left a clearer message about the impact that computing can have.
To address the second problem, they introduced more team projects, and more importantly (I think) they started to create a support network for women within the CS department. The organization is called Women at SCS and is still going strong today.
These two changes together actually stopped the attrition of women from their program. CMU has been actively working the last few years, in cooperation with other organizations such as CRA-W and the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology to disseminate their learnings and best practices more widely.
CMU has done many other very cool things -- I encourage you to look at the Women at SCS web site, and read Fisher and Margolis' book. One of the smartest things they did has helped to address the problem of attracting women into CS program in the first place by influencing high school programs. A few years back when the AP exam in Computer Science switched from Pascal to C++, CMU got some funding to run summer training programs for high school CS teachers to train them on teaching C++. The CMU instructors inserted a unit at the end of the program to inform the high school teachers about the issues they had discovered with attracting and retaining women in CS programs, and what they should be doing (and not doing) in their school to encourage women both explicitly and implicitly to pursue the field. I bring this up for a slightly different reason; while this particular effort didn't actually show any impact, it's still a great example of how we can be thoughtful, creative and opportunistic in choosing things to do.
CRA-W organized the Grad Cohort program to try to address the same issues with women grad students, not only to help them stick with it through grad school but to help prepare them for a career in the computing profession (academia or industry). The workshop brought together about 75 women from across North America to meet each other and share their experiences. It was an amazing event. I had the privilege of joining them for their banquet dinner, and it was fascinating to hear their stories - and to watch the way they all interacted. I can't tell you how many of them told me essentially the same thing: "I never knew there were so many other people having the same experience I was." It wa a first step toward creating a support network for the women in the cohort that we hope will carry on through their professional careers.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Anita Borg Institute and the great work that they have been doing too. They host the best-known event in this domain: the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (this year it's October 6-9 in Chicago). Anita Borg was an amazing woman.
Past student issues, there are additional issues for professional women in technology. Many of the student issues are echoed both in university faculty and in industry. Additionally, as women move toward thinking about having a family, they can discover that their workplace can be explictly or implicitly hostile to women. Much of the attrition of women for tech jobs (as with other industries) is when they come to the conclusion that it's just too difficult to try to find a balance between family and work, and they choose family -- whereas men, given the same struggle, will often choose work. (once again, I'm overgeneralizing -- and I know this because I face that battle constantly as a single parent, and I choose family).
But the big take-away from all of this is that we're a lot smarter about the issues facing women in computing than we used to be. Women go into computing because they see the potential impact, and they will stay with it more consistently when they can see the impact. Women are more reliant on a support network of their peers to help set expectations appropriately. And women will find a work/life balance where they fele that they are not shortchanging their family.
And we know some real things that we can do to that help attract and retain women in computing.
Microsoft Research, as I mentioned before, has been a supporter of these efforts for a number of years. While we don't know everything yet, we know an awful lot, and I have been trying to push our efforts away from doing more studies and towards taking action. When the things we know how to do have been adopted broadly ad we've run out of ideas for how to make further improvements, I'll be first in line to support more studies. But my feeling in particular is that there is so much we can and should be doing now, we just need to roll up our sleeves and get moving.
9:34:29 PM  ; ;
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