NEWS & CURRENT ACTIVITIES

Trip Report:

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

Who:  Marlena Compton, Chair, Computing Women of SPSU

          Neta Blackwell, Vice-Chair, Computing Women of SPSU

          Melissa Blanchard, Treasurer, Computing Women of SPSU

Where:  Vancouver , British Columbia , Canada

When:  November 9-12, 2002

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a conference that is held biannually and focuses on issues surrounding women in Computer Science.  GHC was attended by approximately 600 people from all over the world.  SPSU’s delegation focused on gathering information from panels and workshops relevant to the School of Computing ’s needs.  The information falls into several topics that provide the structure for this report.  They are:

1.  Recruiting and Retaining Women in Academia

2.  Student-based Mentoring

3.  Undergraduate Research

4.  Coursework and the Community 

5.  Strategies for ACM-W Chapters

6.  Graduate School


1.      Recruiting and Retaining Women in Academia

This is the title of a panel whose purpose was to gauge the progress of women in Computer Science.  The main finding is that while there is small improvement in the number of women seeking Computer Science degrees, the number of women seeking Ph.D. degrees has not improved very much.  Following is a list of the panel members and the information they presented:

Some introductory statistics:

In college teaching, percentage who are women:

Teacher:  26%

Assistant professor:  14%

Associate professor:  13%

Full professor:  8%

1. Maria Klawe:  

Area:  Girls

When girls reach the 7^th or 8^th grade, they begin to feel less able at science and math.  Games need to be presented to these girls that are of interest to them and that talk about career opportunities in science and math as a sub-text.  In Vancouver , University of British Columbia has had success  with teaching girls how to use Adobe Photoshop. 

2. Gloria Townsend:

Area:  Undergraduate women

Dr. Townsend is doing things at DePaul University to make women more comfortable when they enter her Computer Science Department.  At DePaul, women are invited to a special workshop before they go to their first lab so that they are familiar with using the compiler.  She also sends a letter to women about to come to her school as freshman to dispel some of the myths about Computer Science.  With her letter, she encloses a brochure that introduces 2 successful female Computer Science students and a teacher from her department.  In each CS1 class, she does her best to have 2 female teaching assistants available to help students.  Half of her lab assistants are female.  At DePaul, more than 50% of the CS1 classes are women.  Dr. Townsend believes that there are 2 generations of change here.  In the first generation, women’s attitudes towards Computer Science need to be changed.  In the second generation, classes need to be changed.  She also pairs women in her classes together so that they can start to build their own network of peer support and gain more confidence in their technical abilities. 

3. Johanne Cohoon:

Area:  Statistics

The heart of Dr. Cohoon’s presentation was statistics.  She pointed out that it looks like the number of women in CS is slowly starting to increase instead of shrink. 

One of her surveys involved 210 of the largest and most prestigious Computer Science programs in the United States .  40% recruit from underrepresented groups.  20% of these departments did not have ANY women faculty.  60% encourage mentoring within their department. 

Her next set of questions dealt with what faculty are doing in the average department. 

41% of faculty encourage women in CS

19% of faculty encourage men in CS

 31% help students get to know each other.

 70%  spend 2 hours per week on mentoring. 

 12% publish with undergraduates as co-authors

 62% of the mentoring done by faculty is student initiated.  This was motivated LEAST by the common desire to overcome underrepresentation.

 Her numbers are available at http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/ITattrit/

4. Janice Cuny: 

Area:  Graduate Women

Degrees to women: 

19%  BS

27% MS

16% Ph.D.

Dr. Cuny is currently working on a CRA-W women’s cohort project.

5. Sheila Humphreys

Area:  Non-traditional Students

 Dr. Humphreys’ department has recently been hit pretty hard by a proposition in California that makes it illegal to formally give support to underrepresented groups.  When she talked about her program at UC-Berkeley, it was in the past tense.  She started a program at her school to get women who already had an undergraduate degree in something else to come back and get an MS in Computer Science.  She would hold workshops with role playing so that the women would not feel out of place or be thrown off by the type of social interactions one has in a Computer Science department.  Graduate women would meet weekly and students at her school give the faculty a review. 

6. Information from Questions:

 At University of British Columbia , Biology majors ( a big science field for women) are now required to take CS1. 

When answering a question, Janice Cuny brought up the fact that she did feel isolated as the only female CS student at Princeton .  She said that despite feeling isolated, when someone asked her why she didn’t try to find some kind of support group, she told them that since she had already made it this far, she didn’t feel that a support group was going to help her. 

One teacher from Kentucky brought up that at her school, the women had sought assistance from the women’s group in the state legislature, and had gotten extra funding through them.

  2.     Student Based Mentoring

Four students from Brown University presented the model for their very successful mentoring program called “The Mentoring Chain Reaction” (MCR) which is part of a larger women’s CS group called “Women in Computer Science”  (WICS).  They use a pyramid structure in which alumnae work with seniors, juniors and seniors work with freshman and sophomores, and freshman go back to their high schools to talk about Computer Science.  If they have weak spots in their pyramid, they look for students who are at the same level in a related field such as EE. 

Activities include co-sponsoring co-ed events with other student organizations, eating lunch with faculty members and allowing interaction with teachers outside of the classroom.  The night before Brown has a job fair, they have a peer to peer resume critique where they put people’s resumes on a transparency so that everyone gets to see resume strengths and weaknesses.  Alumnae are often invited to lunch to talk about their experiences with interviews and working.  All lunches are question driven to allow for more social interaction.   Mentors and mentees are given certificates during the semester so that they can go and have coffee or ice cream together for free. 

WICS did a Girl Scout program last year which lasted for 2 days.  The first day they took apart computers and the second day they made web pages. 

 The web-site for WICS and MCR is:

 http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/orgs/wics/

 3.  Undergraduate Research

 Two different opportunities for undergraduate research were presented at a panel.  The first is called the “Distributed Mentoring Project” and is intended for students who intend to go to graduate school.  The second opportunity presented was called “Collaborative Research Experience for Women in Undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering” (CREW) and is ideal for smaller departments where graduate study isn’t pushed as hard.  Statistics and summaries were presented for both types of projects.  

1. Collaborative Research Experience for Women in Undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering (CREW)

 In this program, a faculty member would contact undergraduate students on campus about participating in a research project which would run for the course of the academic year and paid $1000.00 per semester.  This helped students get a better job when they graduated and introduced many seniors to the idea of graduate school.  It also allowed students who doubted their technical abilities to catch up in CS.  Since the program runs over the course of a year, the student had time for false starts and failures which helped in coping with frustration.  Integration into the academic year promoted an increased amount of learning and an appreciation for the value of coursework.  Collaborative research with female peers assisted women in creating their own network. 

 CREW also had benefits for faculty in that it motivated faculty to do research and explore a topic.  It also gave faculty a research staff that they may not have otherwise had. 

 CREW Statistics

52% of participating students were employed in CS after school

32% went to grad school

94% increased interest in CS

61% increase in engagement in courses

61% increase in preparedness for current job

 CREW Web-site

http://www.cra.org/Activities/craw/crew/

2. Distributed Mentor Project (DMP)

DMP is a summer project.  Students and faculty apply in January/February and in the Spring faculty are matched to students.  Students then visit the faculty and do research with them over the Summer.  Students receive $6,000.00 for the summer and travel expenses are covered.  38 students are funded each year and the goal is to get more women to go to graduate school.  The main benefit of the DMP program is that women “shift from learning what is known to discovery”.  Through interaction with other graduate students during the summer, women got to “try grad school on for size” and felt that they had gained “insider knowledge”.  Female mentors were particularly effective because students thought “if she can do it, I can do it too.”

 DMP Statistics

Commit to graduate school

37% before

62% after

 Prepared for graduate school

6% before

67% after

 68% found having a female mentor particularly valuable

 Web Site

http://www.cra.org/Activities/craw/dmp/

 4.      Coursework and the Community

 EPICS – Engineering Projects in Community Service is a project started at Purdue University to involve the students more heavily with the community and provide an environment similar to that of a real world project for all levels of engineering students.  The engineering department teamed up with community leaders to find non-profit organizations in the areas that were in need of engineering projects.  The students then solve the problems given to them from beginning to end…starting with requirements and moving all the way to development and maintenance.  This sort of opportunity is one that students rarely experience in that the systems they develop are not classroom projects, but real world systems that must stand alone long after the students have finished.

 The project puts the students in a situation in which they must work together and complete the project over the course of one to several semesters.  It also allows students at various levels of education to work together on projects and learn from “hands on” experience in the field.  The EPICS program has gained national recognition and has been started in other universities including The Georgia Institute of Technology. 

 Something of this nature could be fairly readily implemented at our university.  It would require at least one enthusiastic professor who would not mind some off-campus (on-site) work and it would require the cooperation of the local city administration (or some other source of non-profit projects in need).  It would provide SPSU students with full lifecycle, “hands on” experience that is not currently available to them.  Moreover it could be put in place in just about any major as an alternative to the senior project.

 For more information on the EPICS project, see their web-site at:

http://epics.ecn.purdue.edu/.

 5.     Strategies for ACM-W Chapters

 A panel was attended that focused on the creation of ACM-W Chapters at colleges and Universities.  There are currently 8 ACM-W chapters in the United States :

 University of South Alabama

Texas A&M

Utah State University

Furman University

Penn State

Central Indiana

SPSU

Eastern Kentucky University

 This project was started in November 1999 to increase the awareness of women in CS, increase recruitment and retention, networking.  An emphasis was placed on the importance of having men somehow involved in or engaged by these Chapters. 

 After the panel, a special area was set aside at lunch for current members of ACM-W Chapters and people interested in them.  The SPSU students were joined by Dr. Gloria Childress Townsend, Chair of the  Computer Science Department at DePaul University .  Dr. Townsend shared her some of her success strategies.  The most intriguing was her idea for sending out a letter and brochure to all incoming women (freshman and transfers) before a semester of school starts.  The letter is from her, and she includes a brochure with it containing profiles of women in the Computer Science Department including students and faculty.  Dr. Townsend emphasized the importance of food, particularly PIZZA at social gatherings.  She has people e-mail her with their preferred pizza type to guarantee some turn out at the meetings. 

 Included in the information handed out at check-in for the conference was an issue of SIGCSE Inroads.  This particular issue was the special issue on women in Computer Science and contained two articles from Carnegie Mellon University .  CMU has greatly increased the number of female students enrolling in their program and has a vary active group that promotes women in Computer Science.  An article by Lenore Blum and Carol Frieze entitled “Building an Effective Computer Science Student Organization: The Carnegie Mellon Women@SCS Action Plan” contained several ideas for activities that helped in recruiting women for their program.  Many of the activities presented in Frieze and Blum’s paper involved community outreach and the involvement of students.  The activities have included providing a workshop at a conference for middle school girls to introduce them to robotics (Blum and Frieze 77).  The council has also created a “road show” for presentation to middle school and high school students consisting of a PowerPoint slide presentation aimed at de-stereotyping the image of a computer scientist (Women@SCS). 

 Carnegie Mellon Women@SCS web-site:

http://wascs.sp.cs.cmu.edu/

 6.           Graduate School

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing offered two panel discussions on graduate school.  Here are the abstracts from the panels:

 This panel will provide information about the process and opportunities of applying to graduate school, the research environment and the particular issues women graduate students face. The objective of the panel is to encourage more women to pursue an advance degree in CSE and to help them better understand the graduate school experience. The panel will discuss preparation for graduate school such as course selection, developing working relationships with faculty, letters of recommendation, where to apply, and financial aid. Women at all levels of undergraduate education and faculty members seeking to improve the advisor-student relationship will benefit from this panel.

This panel will provide in-depth presentations, discussion, and strategies on how underrepresented minority women with an interest in computer science and engineering can attend and thrive in graduate school. Based on a successful workshop that visits Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other Minority Serving Institutions, the panel will bring essential information to young women attending Hopper. This panel not only examines the culture of the computing and research environments facing women and minority graduate students but also provides an overview of MS and Ph.D. programs, the logistics of the admissions process, and a discussion of graduate student life.

 Both panels provided the opportunity for prospective and current graduate students to voice their concerns, ideas, and experiences with the process of getting into and staying in graduate school.

          Some of the most interesting discussions centered around making the choice between the Masters Degree or the Doctoral Degree.  For women who are unsure about which degree to pursue one option was to find Doctoral programs that would award Master’s Degrees half way through the program.  This would allow the student the freedom to stop halfway through, if she felt that the Doctorate was not what she wanted after all.  The other suggestion was to participating in undergraduate research to see if that is what you would enjoy doing.  If research is not what you enjoy, then the Master’s Degree is more appropriate.

          Other topics included the importance of visiting campuses and speaking to faculty and students to get a feel for the environment and the politics of the department.  The panels also mentioned that  the reputation of the department and faculty is more important than the ranking of the school.

For more information on research opportunities for women:          http://www.cra.org/Activities/craw/

 For more information on getting into graduate school go here:

http://www.cra.org/Activities/craw/projects/mentoring/mentorWrkshp/grad-guide.pdf

Conclusions from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing:

 While the female to male ratio at SPSU is extraordinarily low, there are things that can be done in a cost effective manner to improve this ratio.  There are also strategies that can be used to retain the women already in the program.  Several proposals to the faculty in the School of Computing are being developed from the information gathered at this conference.  Particularly, proposals are being developed for a CREW research program and a student-based mentoring program.  The student chapter of ACM-W (Computing Women of SPSU) will also benefit from the new ideas learned at the conference. 

Works Cited

Blum, Lenore and Carol Frieze.  “Building an Effective Computer Science Student Organization:  The Carnegie Mellon Women@SCS Action Plan.”  SIGCSE Bulletin:  Inroads  (June 2002):  74-78.