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But very few of those women go on to graduate with a CS degree. Here's why.
In the classrooms at Georgia Tech, among the laptops and notebooks and lines of code, senior computer science major Marguerite Murrell likes to play a game she's dubbed "Count the Girls."
Women earn only 18% of computer science bachelor's degrees in the United States. And leaders such as Apple CEO Tim Cook have stated that if the US tech industry doesn't solve its gender imbalance issues then America will lose its lead in tech.
But in recent years, a number of top colleges have made efforts to draw women into the field with revamped introductory courses that make the technology less intimidating for those that enter college without prior programming experience—largely, women—among other efforts. Many of these schools boast about gender parity in these basic courses and incoming freshman classes. But for upper-level students, men continue to dominate technical courses in robotics, machine learning, and security, and "Count the Girls" still yields poor results in those classes.
A confluence of factors prevent women from pursuing and persisting in computer science majors, according to Wendy DuBow, director of evaluation and senior research scientist at the National Center for Women & Information Technology. A lack of exposure to computer science and engineering concepts in middle school and high school, well-meaning teachers or parents steering girls away from tech-focused classes, and a general lack of awareness of potential careers in the tech field all contribute.
Recent high-profile sexual harassment cases at tech firms such as Uber also do not make the field appear as an attractive place for women to build a career, DuBow said, no matter how lucrative.
Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley, and Georgia Institute of Technology have all made a concerted effort to attract female students to computer science programs.
"Academic institutions that commit to parity really do start to see results when they use research-based practices, like scaffolding their intro courses or making sure their faculty use inclusive pedagogy in the classroom," DuBow said. However, challenges with isolation, stereotyping, and confidence still remain.
What follows is a look beyond the glossy college catalogues into what female computer science majors actually experience on campus, and why changing introductory courses isn't enough to build the pipeline of women needed to fill tech jobs.
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| Hear Alison DeNisco explain how she reported this story about women in computer science programs. |
Progress made, work ahead
Many colleges recognize that the way their computer science programs were structured discouraged women from entering, said Elizabeth Ames, senior vice president of marketing alliances and programs for the Anita Borg Institute. For example, entry-level courses often assumed that students had a background in programming already. And, women in tech had little community on campus.
The oft-named success story of changing this approach is found at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA, where the percentage of female computer science majors grew from less than 15% in 2006 to 55% in 2016, largely thanks to the initiatives put in place by its president Maria Klawe.
Carnegie Mellon University has seen similar results: Women made up more than 48% of incoming freshman in the computer science major in 2016-17—a far cry from 8% in the 1990s, and even 34% in 2013. Many of the changes were spurred by Lenore Blum, a professor of computer science who joined the faculty in 1999.
Her guiding philosophy? "The minority in any community does not have the same access to the critical academic and professional opportunities and advantages that the majority has, and these are critical for success," Blum said. For example, male computer science majors have easy access to role models who look like them, in both their professors and people in the workforce, and are more likely to have roommates or people living in their dorm who are also studying computer science and can help with homework.
"If you're a woman, and one out of a very small number, you don't have those built-in connections, and your teachers don't look like you," Blum said. "You have nobody to ask naturally at night to work on homework with you. It would probably be pretty awkward to call up a guy and say, 'Hey, I'm having problems with my homework and it's midnight. Want to come over?' Not so easy to do."...
The intro course and the confidence gap
Research shows that when a male and a female student enter a computer science course at the same level, the male thinks he's more skilled than he is, and the female thinks she's less skilled than she is, said Barb Ericson, director of computing outreach for the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. A 2016 study from Harvard's Women in Computer Science Advocacy Council found that women with up to eight years of programming experience report the same level of confidence as men with zero to one year of programming experience.
"A lot of women tend to leave the major even though they have better grades than the guys who stay, because they're not confident in their abilities," Ericson said.
The confidence factor also impacts who takes computer science introductory courses, and who opts out. At Harvard, the intro course CS50 is designed for both majors and non-majors, and had 38% women during the 2016-2017 school year.
"It's taken on its own persona in the college," said Priscilla Guo, a senior technology, policy, and society concentrator at Harvard. "It's very sensationalized, and is one of those must-take courses. Every single lecture is almost like one of those showcases at a tech conference, in that there is a lot of interaction and engagement with the audience. It's like a show."
The course's goal is to make programming more relatable, and students are offered a lot of support, including several teaching assistants and 24-hour office hours. However, once you get to the second intro course, the number of women drops, Guo said. And in 2017, 29% of Harvard's computer science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women.
The problem? "So many more men than women come to college with programming experience, and skip CS50," said Michelle Danoff, who graduated from Harvard in 2017 with a degree in computer science, and now works as an associate product manager at Google. "If you look at how students progress through the department, there's a decrease [of women] in the higher-level courses in large part because there's just so many men going directly to them."
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Source: TechRepublic
