Friday, January 25, 2002

2 Professors Offer Advice on Making Computer Science More Open to Women By BROCK READ When Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher asked female computer-science students at Carnegie Mellon University how they felt about majoring in a field dominated by men, the two scholars received vivid and disturbing responses: Students compared their experiences to drowning, running uphill, and walking over a tenuous bridge. Quotes like these drive the work of Ms. Margolis, a researcher at the Graduate School of Education and Information Systems of the University of California at Los Angeles, and Mr. Fisher, president and chief executive officer of Carnegie Technology Education, a subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon. In a new book, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (MIT Press, 2002), the two explore the digital gender gap and propose steps that high schools and colleges can take to bridge it. That a gender gap exists, say the book's authors, is indisputable. In 1995, when Ms. Margolis and Mr. Fisher began conducting surveys at Carnegie Mellon, only 7 percent of students entering the computer-science program were women; female students were twice as likely as their male counterparts to leave the major. After spending five years revamping the university's school of computer science, Ms. Margolis, Mr. Fisher, and their colleagues say they have righted the numbers: About 40 percent of computer-science students at Carnegie Mellon are women, and they are no more likely than men to change their focus. To understand gender inequity in computer science, argues the book, one must realize that women are no less interested or skilled in computer science than men; they are simply discouraged by society from acting on any interest in the field. The conditioning starts when they are children. Even well-meaning parents, according to Ms. Margolis and Mr. Fisher, are more likely to place a family computer in a boy's room than in a girl's. Schools, meanwhile, often do little to encourage girls to delve into the "boy's world" of computing. By the time women enroll in college, they often have much less computing experience than men. They are not helped by computer-science curricula, which often assume some knowledge of the field and focus on the computer as an end unto itself. Women are further alienated by a stifling "geek culture" that celebrates obsessive computing at the expense of broad interests, according to the authors. Carnegie Mellon students described their travails in a series of confidential interviews conducted by Ms. Margolis. She and Mr. Fisher tracked the progress of students from the incoming class of 1995 through all four years of their collegiate careers; students who entered the institution in 1996 and 1997 were also interviewed. Starting in 1995, the computer-science school started a series of programs -- including new admissions policies, interdisciplinary courses, and community groups -- designed to make computer science more accommodating to women. When the National Science Foundation asked universities to train teachers of high-school Advanced Placement courses in a new programming language, Ms. Margolis and Mr. Fisher jumped at the chance, leading classes on C++ and gender issues. "The research is the best I've seen in 30 years," says Lenore Blum, an expert on gender in science, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and faculty adviser to Women@SCS, an organization that offers counseling and events for female students. "But the really important thing is the action." The success of Women@SCS, she argues, is evidence that universities can build environments that encourage women to pursue computer science. "I think we've really seen something critical happen" at the university, she says. Ms. Margolis and Mr. Fisher warn that Carnegie Mellon's approach might not work similarly for all institutions. But they argue that several of its basic principles are universal: interdisciplinary teaching, student support, admissions based on more than computing experience, and "ferocious attention to the quality of student experience." Mr. Fisher says that the book's appeal transcends the classroom. "We worked hard to make the book interesting even to people who aren't computer-science professors," he says. "We're hopeful that we can reach a somewhat wider audience than the book might normally reach." Unlocking the Clubhouse, he says, can be a valuable tool not just for educators, but for parents and students as well. So far, both authors say, feedback has been very positive, especially from female students. Ms. Margolis says she has received e-mail messages from students saying, This exactly explains what I went through. Adds Ms. Margolis: "It strikes a very familiar chord." The pair continue to examine issues of gender in computing. Ms. Margolis is surveying the roles of women and minority students in computer courses at three Los Angeles high schools, while Mr. Fisher is part of a project exploring recruitment and teacher training in postsecondary education. "Computing is the new realm of power," says Ms. Margolis of her research focus. "Women have made advances in medicine, law, politics -- but in hard sciences and technology, it's really been hard for them to enter and to stay." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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