Before my article 5 Ways to Welcome Women to Computer Science was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, there was, of course, a longer version. I’d like to share that here because it includes some details—and one entire point—that didn’t make print.
It’s also come to my attention that the Chronicle article is behind a paywall. My blog, of course, is not.
So without further ado or revisions, here it is.
6 Ways Whitman College Welcomes Women to Computer Science
When Janet Davis graduated from college 20 years ago with a degree in computer science, she was the only woman in her class to do so. Now a tenured professor and chair of Whitman’s computer science department, she has led the charge to improve the program’s gender balance, with promising results: women represent a third of computer science majors in the Class of 2020.
In 1999, at the height of the dot-com revolution, I was the only woman to graduate from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in computer science. [1]
The secret to my success? Supportive professors and classmates, yes – but along with that, willful obliviousness to my difference. In many of my computer science classes, I was the only woman. In some classes, I sat in the front row with my best (male) buddies and pretended the rest of the class was not there behind me. As far as I was concerned, it was all between me, my friends, and the professor. In other classes, I kept to myself and quietly receded into the background. I was baffled but intensely grateful when in my Software Development class a slightly older student noticed the quality of my work and invited me to join his project team, even though we didn’t particularly know each other.
Only occasionally was my difference called out, most memorably when a professor started class by announcing, “Now, gentlemen, settle down – and Janet, too.” Of course, I was minding my own business, not making a sound.
Twenty years later, I serve as founding chair of Whitman’s new computer science department. Obliviousness is not a strategy I can teach my women students – especially not now, when we all have become aware of the persistent underrepresentation of women in the tech industry. Nor should students have to create the conditions they need to succeed. Rather, it is the responsibility of instructors and departments to create an inclusive learning environment in which everyone can succeed.
While I appreciate all that Maria Klawe and my awesome computer science colleagues at Harvey Mudd have done to increase the representation of women there, not enough has been said in public about what is being done to welcome women into computer science at other kinds of institutions. Harvey Mudd likes to be called the “liberal arts college of science and engineering,” and enrollment of women in computer science has surely benefitted as the gender ratio at the college overall approaches equality. At a small liberal arts college like Whitman – with a majority of women but a minority of STEM majors – we face a somewhat different challenge in attracting women to the discipline and keeping them engaged.
As the female founder of a growing department at a small liberal arts college, here are six of my most important strategies.
1. Make computing relevant.
Many have talked about how women and minority students are motivated when they see computing not as a toy, but as a tool for solving problems that matter. To broaden the appeal of the existing introductory course, I renamed it to emphasize problem solving over programming, just like Harvey Mudd faculty did ten years before. At the same time, Harvey Mudd faculty redesigned their introductory course so that students solve problems in science and engineering, a domain of interest to all their students. At Whitman, I need to address a broader liberal arts audience. My colleague Andy Exley and I chose a textbook that presents examples from many domains, from compound interest and DNA analysis to social simulations and text mining. I also try to avoid examples in gendered domains such as football, as well as domains like video games that reinforce the geek stereotype. A textbook I use in another class deliberately presents gender-neutral data modeling examples like lunch menus and crop rotations. Many of my students nonetheless choose to do final projects in which they write programs modeling aspects of sports or video games. But the sports projects have modeled ski trail connectivity, Olympic swimming records, and softball team statistics, while other projects have involved naming the constellations that stars belong to, answering historical questions about U.S. presidents, and representing musical notation. Final projects in this course and several others provide an opportunity for students to apply computing in ways that they find personally meaningful.
2. Make computing social.
A common stereotype is that programmers are solitary creatures, working their magic late at night in a dimly-lit basement. Even if there was once a kernel of truth in that stereotype, today programming is a team sport. In industry, much attention is given to agile software development, emphasizing close communication and collaboration over written specifications. One particular agile practice, pair programming, has been adopted at many schools including Whitman. CS education research has shown that pair programming, in which two programmers work side-by-side to solve a problem together, has been shown to increase retention of women. Our students report that pair programming makes work more enjoyable, helps them use their time more effectively, and provides opportunities to learn from peers. In exit interviews, our seniors have pointed to pair programming and team projects as among the things they liked best about the computer science major. It’s evident we’ve been successful at building a culture of collaboration.
Further bucking the stereotype, one of the things I love best about our main teaching lab is its location, right next to the front door of our building where everyone passes by, with large windows overlooking the center of our campus.
3. Bridge the confidence gap.
In the computing classroom as elsewhere, blustery men can seem to know more than they do, while less confident women question their abilities to the point that even success can make them feel like imposters. That our stereotyped programmer is always male only serves to amplify the confidence gap. Many strategies seek to mitigate this gap. At Harvey Mudd and at Whitman, we seek to identify the most experienced and self-confident programmers among our incoming students, so that we can track them directly into an intermediate-level course. This means our introductory course is reserved for the true beginners and those who need more practice to build confidence. In the classroom, when a student asks a question that seems designed to show off their prior knowledge (usually, though not always, a male student), I redirect them my office hours rather than starting a one-on-one conversation during class. I’ve even asked students to save their questions for after class so as not to intimidate their classmates. An advantage of our small classes is that I can pay attention not just to gender but to personality when forming pairs and teams. The first time I assign pairs in the introductory class, I pair women with other women in hope that they find mutual support. As I learn more about my students, I seek to pair students who are similar in their abilities. I try to pair less confident women with classmates of any gender who are patient and considerate. And when forming larger project teams in upper level courses, we all seek to avoid placing a woman on a team of mostly men, to make sure women are not isolated and to foster teams with gender-equitable communication styles. This has been a particular challenge for senior capstone teams. But with the class of 2020 being one-third women, I was able to advise my colleague John Stratton on forming teams in which all our women can thrive.
4. Welcome late-bloomers.
The same stereotypes that undermine women’s confidence in their abilities can push them away from computing altogether, starting at an early age. Although this is beginning to change, with earlier, problem-driven exposure to computing such as middle-school robotics competitions, young women are still less likely than young men to start college with prior programming experience. This is a barrier for diversity at universities where students must start taking courses in their major during their first semester, or worse, where students must apply to the computer science major before even graduating from high school. As a science and engineering school, Harvey Mudd addresses this problem by requiring all first-year students to take the introductory computer science course, which is designed to be as broadly appealing as possible. At Whitman, we can’t make first-year students take computer science. But we have designed the major to give as many opportunities to start as possible, even as late as the sophomore year. This works. For one example, my current research assistant, Buyaki Nyatichi, worried about her late arrival to computer science after discovering the 3-2 engineering program was not going to work for her. But she’s not just on track to graduate on time, she’s also been able to study abroad and continue her pursuit of a second major in German Studies.
Beyond the major, we reserve seats in the introductory class for students in all four class years. Even those who begin too late to pursue a major are encouraged to pursue a minor or at least take the classes that fit in their schedule.
5. Provide diverse role models.
When I enrolled at Harvey Mudd more than twenty years ago, the computer science faculty were all white or Asian men. I felt an immediate connection to Harvey Mudd’s first woman professor of computer science, hired while I was a student. While I had not yet thought much about plans for after college, I began to see myself in her position. And now at Whitman, I’m well aware of the symbolic value of having a woman as the senior member and chair of the department. Since my first child was born 18 months ago, I proudly display photos on my desk and my office door. And when they ask, I talk frankly with my students about my experience as a woman in the field. I tell them about navigating relationships with graduate advisors, some easy and some difficult, including one that led me to see a counselor. I share my mixed feelings about changing my research area from computer networks, a “hard” subfield in which there are few women, to the “soft” subfield of human-computer interaction where women are well-represented. Most recently, I reflect on the joys and challenges of returning to faculty work after becoming a mother.
But this isn’t just about me. At a programmatic level, we seek to hire diverse students as class mentors and lab aides. Among a pool of candidates with similar grades and communication skills, we favor women and students belonging to other underrepresented groups in order to provide students with a range of role models. Moreover, the program benefits from reserving seats for upper-level students in our introductory course. Even though they are not CS majors, senior women can create a critical mass of women in the room. They often provide positive role models for first- and second-year women, sharing not just their maturity and experience but also their curiosity, and particularly their willingness to take risks in the academic setting. And finally, we use our department tackboard, email list, and Facebook group, as well as alumni visits, to promote diverse role models from beyond the walls of our college. As one of my students points out, having a critical mass of diverse role models normalizes diversity in computing for male students as well.
6. Share opportunities.
We have a busy department email list, on which faculty share advertisements of five or more opportunities each week of the semester, ranging from public talks to internships. I sometimes hesitate over sharing opportunities that are open to only some of our students – for example, National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates, which are open only to U.S. citizens, or scholarships for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, open only to women. However, opportunities like these are so critical for students to learn about the world of computing beyond Whitman College and to pursue – or discover – their dreams. More pragmatically, it has become very difficult to launch a career in computing without relevant internship or research experience prior to graduation.
Due to opportunities shared on the email list and at our weekly community-building CS Lunch series, students have not only obtained internships and research positions, but have also participated in the Grace Hopper Celebration, the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, the annual meeting of the National Society of Blacks in Computing, the Out for Technology Undergraduate Conference hosted by Facebook, the OurCS research workshop for women hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, a Code for Good hackathon hosted by Reed College, and probably more that I’m forgetting. Opportunities such as these are especially critical for women and minorities to gain experience, confidence, social capital, and access to further opportunities, as their competence may not be presumed in the way it often is for those who resemble the stereotypes.
There’s always more we could be doing, and there are some things we just can’t do. For example, we don’t have the funding to regularly take large groups of students to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing like Harvey Mudd does. Due to faculty sabbaticals and a tight job market, we have a visiting professor teaching the introductory course right now, rather than our most experienced instructors. We may never be big enough to form a student chapter of the ACM-W Council on Women in Computing. We should do an inclusive environment assessment before updating our lab spaces. And I could be doing more to help my junior colleagues follow the best practices I’ve developed over more than ten years as faculty at small liberal arts colleges.
Yet, we’re seeing some success. In the class of 2019, the first class who could declare a computer science major in their sophomore year, we graduated only one woman out of fifteen computer science majors: Melissa Kohl, a CS-Physics double major who is headed to Google this fall (we are so proud of her!). Thanks to her recruiting efforts, as well as the strategies above, the Whitman CS class of 2020 is one-third women.
Even though Melissa was the only woman CS major to graduate last year, she never shared my experience of being the only woman in a CS class. I hope that no Whittie will be the only woman in the computer science major again.
Where are we now, in 2021? Unfortunately, no better, but also not significantly worse:
| Class year | Total | Gender ratio |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 23 | 1:3 |
| 2022 | 20 | 1:3 |
| 2023 | 12 (so far) | 1:2 |
Mad props to Gillian Frew in Whitman’s Communications office for guiding me in cutting the draft above to a publishable length. Thanks also to Denise Magner, editor of the Chronicle’s career-advice and academic work-culture sections, for her pointed questions. Both of their inputs made the published version of this essay that much stronger.
[1] Apologies to Liz Gordon ’99! I have a hard time remembering who was in my graduating class and who was a year ahead or behind me. I fact checked this with the HMC Alumni Office, and apparently they told me wrong.