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­U.S. Women in Computing: Why Isn’t It Getting Better?

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Georgia Institute of Technology Professor Mark Guzdial

 Jane Margolis and Alan Fisher wrote about their landmark effort to improve the percentage of women in undergraduate computing at Carnegie Mellon University in their 2001 book “Unlocking the Clubhouse.”  Their effort was successful, so clearly, it was possible to move the needle, to improve the percentage of women in computing.  Over 10 years later, where are we?

Lecia Barker (of NCWIT and the University of Texas at Austin) shared the below graph with me, pulled from US Department of Education IPEDS data.  As you can see, since 2005, the percent of bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science awarded to women has dropped.  Computer Engineering has the lowest percent of degrees going to women among these listed, and Information Systems is plummeting.

When I posted this graph on my blog, Cameron Wilson of the ACM Education Policy Committee shared with me some similar data that he gathered, comparing the number of women graduating with BS, MS, and PhD degrees in CS.  As you can see, the number of women graduating with BS and PhD degrees in CS has dropped across the years shown (well, it’s hard to tell with the PhD since the numbers are so low) — but MS has increased.  Cameron says that virtually all of this is due to foreign students.  There is no increase in MS degrees among U.S. women.

This last week, Reuters reported on a survey of technology firms on women in management positions in their companies.

 

The number of women in senior technology positions at U.S. companies is down for the second year in a row, according to a survey published on Monday.

Nine percent of U.S. chief information officers (CIOs) are female, down from 11 percent last year and 12 percent in 2010, according to the survey by the U.S. arm of British technology outsourcing and recruitment company Harvey Nash Group.

About 30 percent of those polled said their information technology (IT) organization has no women at all in management. Yet only about half of survey respondents consider women to be under-represented in the IT department.

What’s going on here?  We’ve known about the problem for over a decade, and yet we seem to be making little progress.  Why is that?

 

Could it be that we in the IT community are not yet convinced that there’s a problem?  Improving the diversity of our field is not a problem that can be fixed top-down.  It’s improved by changes in individual organizations, in the behavior of individuals. I was shocked at the last sentence in the Reuters quote above.  Only half of the survey respondents think that women are under-represented in their department, when 30% of those polled say that there are no women at all in IT management in their companies?  

NCWIT (National Center for Women & IT) has been explicitly tackling the challenge of documenting the need for more women in computing.  They’ve put together a tool for comparing (a) the number of computing degree graduates in a local region in the US (at the state or congressional district level), and (b) the number of jobs predicted in that same region.  The gap is enormous.  We’re not producing nearly enough graduates to meet the needs.

Fortunately, there’s hope for solving the problem of too few CS graduates.  We’re still not adequately reaching half the population who would be great in CS: Women. There is no innate reason why women should not be half of the CS graduates, e.g., women have the same mathematics ability as men.  I know where we could find a lot more graduates, if we want to make the effort to engage female students, to market computing to them, and to change our culture so that the graduates succeed in their companies — just as Margolis and Fisher told us over a decade ago.

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