The evolving culture of computing: Similarity is the difference

Frontiers

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 110-125

  Blum, Lenore ^a   Frieze, Carol ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 21144448901     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2005.0002     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002);
2. Allan Fisher and Jane Margolis, "Unlocking the Clubhouse: The Carnegie Mellon Experience," special issue
3. "Women in Computing," Inroads, SIGCSE Bulletin 34, no. 2 (2002): 79-83. This special issue has the most comprehensive collection of articles on women and computing to date.
4. Widely cited statistics, from Tracy Camp, "The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline," Communications of the ACM 40, no. 10 (1997):103-10 (http://www.mines.edu/fs.home/tcamp/cacm/paper.html);
5. and Tracy Camp, Keith Miller and Vanessa Davies, The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline Unlikely to Reverse," 1999, http://www.mines.edu/fs_home/tcamp/ new-study/new-study.html; indicate that the percentage of women entering CS and IT programs and careers in the United States declined precipitously during the past decade and suggest change is unlikely. According to the New York Times, 22 May 2003, the national average for women students in undergraduate programs in CS in the United States in 2003 was 15 percent.
6. Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse, 109-27, 130.
7. The Women@SCS website, http://women.cs.cmu.edu/
8. contains information about the organization and its many activities as well as resources for students and teachers. For discussion of its role in transforming the culture of computing see, Lenore Blum, "Transforming the Culture of Computing at Carnegie Mellon," Computing Research News 13, no. 5 (2001): 2, 6, 9, http://www.cra.org/CRN/issues/0105.pdf;
9. Lenore Blum, "Women in Computer Science: The Carnegie Mellon Experience," in The Innovative University, ed. D. P. Resnick and D. S. Scott (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004) 111-29, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lblum/PAPERS/women.in_computer_science.pdf.
10. Carol Frieze and Lenore Blum, "Building an Effective Computer Science Student Organization: The Carnegie Mellon Women@SCS Action Plan," special issue
11. "Women in Computing," Inroads, SIGCSE Bulletin 34, no. 2 (2002): 74-78, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cfrieze/paper.html.
12. The 2002 senior CS class had a total of 153 students (including thirteen fifth-year seniors I with twenty-four women (15.7 percent). Throughout the spring semester 2002, we conducted interviews with thirty-three of these students, seventeen women and sixteen men. (All twenty-four women in the class were invited to be interviewed as well as twenty-four randomly selected men in the class.) The interview questions (available upon request) were adapted as appropriate from the Margolis-Fisher questionnaire (Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse, 145-53). The questions were openended and meant to solicit perceptions and comments more than direct quantifiable information. As in the earlier studies, the interviews were transcribed and imported into NUD*IST (a qualitative analysis software package) to examine salient variables addressing issues of change. Researchers Elizabeth A. Larsen and Margaret L. Stubbs coded and analyzed the data using this tool; their results are presented in a companion paper, "The Evolving Culture of Computing: Undergrad Perceptions of Change and Gender by a Cohort in Transition at Carnegie Mellon University: Findings from Preliminary and Secondary Analyses of Interviews with Spring 2002 Seniors in the Computer Science Department" (Report to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, New York, 2003). Although this research represents a qualitative, interview-based case study, we note that with open-ended questions and a small number of participants, the presence of as few as two or three similar responses takes on magnified significance.
13. Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse.
14. Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse, 5.
15. Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse, 90-91. Such transferring out has diminished considerably. For example, of the first large class of forty-nine women (of a class of 130) who entered the program in 1999, forty-three graduated from Carnegie Mellon (thirty-five from CS, two from information sciences, four from the business school, one from biology and one with a self-defined major), four are on leave (of these, three are expected to graduate in CS) and two withdrew.
16. Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse, 5.
17. Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse, 52-54, 131-33, 140-41.
18. The word "geek" seems to have entered the vernacular in the 1990s as a label for computer obsessed individuals lacking social skills. Although the word "geek" is often used disparagingly, the moniker is also worn with pride among some members of the computing culture.
19. Lee Sproull, Sara Kiesler, and David Zubrow, "Encountering an Alien Culture," Journal of Social Issues 40, no. 3 (1984): 31-48;
20. Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse.
21. "Living among the Programming Gods: The Nexus of Confidence and Interest,"
22. Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse, 77-92.
23. We note that the 2002 entering CS class had nine African American students (three women) and ten Hispanic male students (in a class of size 133). Currently (for the academic year 2004-2005) there are fifty-three African American, Hispanic, and Native American undergraduate students in the CS program (eight women, forty-five men). Although underrepresented minority enrollment is growing campus-wide, there has been a recent precipitous drop in the overall number of students applying to CS nationwide - and at Carnegie Mellon - affecting newly recruited populations, with less stable roots in the field, even more. Some factors causing the general downturn seem to be: the dot-corn bust, concerns about outsourcing, and the public image of computer science as programming. This downturn has sounded alarms within the CS community at large causing many CS departments and major professional societies to start looking for solutions. We believe that many of the successful strategies for recruiting and retaining women in CS can apply to recruiting underrepresented as well as majority students into the field. Clearly this is a situation to be followed.
24. These responses indicate the major "backlash" we had to address in the first years of the transition. They also indicate the need to educate the community in the early stages of any educational reform. At a special faculty meeting in January 2000, as sociate dean Peter Lee explicitly pointed to the challenges and opportunities afforded by our newly diversified student body. He outlined suggestions for faculty involvement that could assist in positive outcomes. Although these and related issues continue to be addressed on an "as needed" basis, we believe ongoing forums would be even more beneficial.
25. SCS departments and faculty represent fields ranging from core CS to robotics, human-computer interaction, language technologies, computation, neurobiology, and entertainment technology.
26. Joanne McGrath Cohoon stresses the importance of institutional support for effective change in "Toward Improving Female Retention in the Computer Science Major," Communications of the ACM 44, no. 5 (May 2001): 108-14.
27. Richard A. Tapia and Cynthia Lanius, "Underrepresented Minority Achievement and Course Taking: the Kindergarten-Graduate Continuum," http://ceee.rice.edu/Books/DV/continuum/.
28. The percentage of women from the participating schools entering our undergraduate CS program in 1999, and again in 2000, was 18 percent, compared to o percent in 1995. Unfortunately, at our own institution, the focus on gender in these workshops was discontinued after the original three summers. One apparent reason was that an early evaluation deemed this component unsuccessful in the only variable that was considered: Did the teachers attract more females to their classes after participating in the workshop? See Patricia B. Campbell, Lesli Hoey, and Lesley S. Perlman, "Integrating gender equity training and teacher retooling for the high school computer science classroom (6APT): Some results from the data," (Groton, MA: CampbellKibler Associates, 2000);
29. Jo Sanders, "Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: When good projects go bad. Girls and computer science," paper presented at the annual American Educational Research Association meeting (April 2002), http://edtech.connect.msu.edu/Searchaera2002/viewproposaltext.asp?propID=6997. We believe this evaluation was seriously flawed: for example, high school teachers may not have much influence on who takes their classes; on the other hand, they may have considerable influence on students' choices of college and major (as our data indicates). In 2004, we rcintroduced discussions of increasing diversity of underrepresented groups into the teacher workshops along with information about the breadth of CS
30. (see: http://women.cs.cmu.edu/Teachers).
31. High school students and teachers tend to equate computer science with programming. Thus outreach programs clearly provide an opportunity to also include materials and start discussions that illuminate the broad range of areas and new directions comprising, and emanating from, computer science. Women@SCS students have designed outreach roadshows for a variety of audiences with these goals in mind (Adaptable presentations can be downloaded from the website: http://women.cs.cmu edu/What/Outreach/Roadshow). This is just one more example of how programs designed to increase the participation of an underrepresented group can serve to enhance the field more generally.
32. This is imperative to ensure that accepted students meet the challenges of a rigorous undergraduate program. Recent data show that gender parity now exists in high-school mathematics. Indeed, the number of girls taking AP calculus now exceeds the number of boys. See Beatriz Chu Clewell and Patricia B. Campbell, "Taking Stock: Where We've Been, Where We Are, Where We're Going," Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 8 (2002): 255-84. Thus, if one removes prior programming as a criterion for entering a college CS program, the potential pool of female students increases dramatically. This highlights the critical importance of effective outreach activities.
33. Lenore Blum and Steven Givant, "Increasing the Participation of Women in the Fields that use Mathematics," American Mathematical Monthly 87, no. 10 (1980): 785-93.
34. All freshman CS majors take this course during the fall of their first year. The course meets once each week for an hour and a half. AS stated in the course description, during this time the students meet and hear from different members of the CS community who talk about their research in CS, past events, and future trends. The idea is to expand the students' concepts of what is available to them as students within the School of Computer Science. See http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-128.
35. In our context, we might say that "critical mass" is attained when being "other" is no longer a major defining or impeding quality, numbers alone are not necessarily the operative issue.
36. A recent British think-tank publication broadly supports our emphasis on professional-community building arguing, as we do, that formal associations can provide support for women in ways informal networks have provided for men. Such "[networks] add value in a variety of ways to women's working lives, from making professional contacts and gaining self-confidence, to finding new friends, learn new skills and accessing mentoring opportunities," Helen McCarthy, Girlfriends in High Places: How Women's Networks Are Changing the Workplace (London: Demos, 2004), 19-20.
37. Frieze and Blum, "Building an Effective Computer Science Student Organization."
38. As additional evidence of the influence of Women@SCS on the entire SCS community, we have witnessed the establishment of two major community-wide endeavors initiated by student members of the Women@SCS Advisory Council: SCS Day (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scsday), an annual event that celebrates the diversity of skills and interests among our faculty, staff, and students, and the reintroduction of the Pittsburgh chapter of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cpsr/), a national public-interest alliance of computer scientists and others concerned about the effects of computer technology on society.
39. Most schools rely on student-run student organizations to provide peer support. However, without regular and ongoing faculty leadership and administrative and staff support, such groups tend to be episodic in their activities and influence-and thus are deemed "low-impact" and unsuccessful (Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse; 134). For such efforts to have high impact and become part of the institutional fabric, it is critical that high level faculty be involved and that staff support be provided. This helps ensure organizational continuity and enables students to bubble with ideas that can be implemented using their energy wisely. For a toolkit of sample activities and suggestions
40. see Frieze and Blum, "Building an Effective Computer Science Student Organixation," 74-78.
41. http://women.cs.cmu.edu/.
42. Fisher and Margolis, "Unlocking the Clubhouse," 80.
43. Contextualizing a course designed to promote abstract and analytical thinking would have to be done with considerable caution not to undermine the kind of skills such a course intends to develop. On the other hand, adding applications to a course may make perfect sense from the perspective of the field irrespective of gender. For example, Lenore Blum is codirector of the ALADDIN Center which promotes synergy between algorithm theory and practice (http://www.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/). The genesis of this center came from Professor Guy Blelloch s graduate course Algorithms in the Real World designed for theoreticians to see how their work is being used in practice (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~guyb/realworld.html).
44. We are in no way implying that the undergraduate CS curriculum as it currently stands needs no revision. To the contrary, effectiveness and relevancy, both with regard to the curriculum and to the way the field is portrayed, are critical if the field is to attract the creative minds necessary for it to thrive in the future. But to do so for the perceived needs of a particular group rather than within a broader context is fraught with problems.