Giant tech companies like Google and Facebook have struggled to achieve any kind of gender balance in their technical staff, in part because computer science programs at top universities skew heavily male. Most of these schools talk about outreach to female students and other measures, but one has actually done something about it. Harvey Mudd’s CompSci majors are now 55% female, according to this article in the LA Times by Rosanna Xia: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-harvey-mudd-tech-women-adv-snap-story.html
That number compares to a mere 10% ten years ago and a current national average of 16%. The article describes a host of changes at Harvey Mudd, including a curriculum revamp and recruitment of new profs.
There’s a lesson here beyond gender parity, too. The curriculum changes seem to have produced a different attitude toward CompSci among the entire student body:
“The introductory course is now one of the most popular across the Claremont campuses. More than 40% of non-computer science majors, hooked after the first class, go on to take at least two more programming courses.”
However “popular” courses do not make a strong computer scientist. Harvey Mudd has some female students rejected for PhD programs in CS because they are on the light side for a CS degree. Harvey Mudd is more liberal artsy and very hard on grading too. So Harvey Mudd graduates, girls or boys, are often disappointed and get rejected for PhD programs at UW Seattle, MIT, and Berkeley , the top PhD programs in the world for CS. Compare the CS programs at Georgia Tech and Harvey Mudd College and you will see that Harvey Mudd is not as strong.
I think it’s great that more women are entering the field. We could do with less of the “brogrammer” attitude. But if my son attended there, I would be pissed that instructors would tell him to not answer. Could you imagine the outrage if the situation were reversed and women, in say a humanities class, were told not to answer?
@Coloradomama, It’s interesting that you put down the top CS programs but failed to list either CMU or Stanford, both of which I consider better than MIT or Berkeley (and I’m an MIT grad). I agree with your other choices though.
This is old news on CC. Mudd also graduates over 50% female engineering majors most years now, and had over 50% of their physics majors as female last year as well. There have been literally dozens of articles like this in the past few years.
I think the thing about the male students is that they tended to dominate the classroom discussions, often with arcane questions that were often more to show off their “chops” than actually advance the topic the class was covering. Combined with a lack of social awareness that they were boring the other class participants and getting the discussion off track. I work in IT, and yeah… many of the men I work with could have benefited greatly from someone helping them stop this behavior before they get to the workplace.
And lack of good grad school admissions? Nope – not seeing it. The Mudders do very well. Grad schools (with the exception of med schools) know that Mudd has grade deflation. I know a Mudder with a 3.3 that got into Stanford. And they get great research opportunities at Mudd if they want them, starting summer after freshman year. (My kid was a CS major for a while, and did 2 summers of research there in CS). They also do well in the workplace. My kid has several friends who were CS majors and are now at Silicon Valley companies or companies like Facebook.
That article also mentions that “women comprise just 30 percent of computer science majors at Stanford”. Meaning that even more men than women choose to major in CS, although 30% is higher than the national percentage of 18%.
HMC students actually do quite well at getting into PhD programs in CS. According to the NSF, Harvey Mudd comes in second in terms of proportions of graduates who go onto get PhDs in all disciplines (both in general and for women), and they come in second for math and statistics, which is often the broad field computer science is included in in these surveys.
That is not what the article said. Here’s what it actually says.
To help female students feel like they belonged, professors found ways to remove the so-called “macho effect” by which more-experienced students — usually male — intimidated others by answering all the questions. They pulled those students aside privately and asked them to let others speak. They urged students to save their more advanced conversations for time with their teachers outside of class.
One, there’s no blanket ban on men being told not to answer - it was specifically students who were intimidating others by dominating the conversation and answering all the questions. This is nothing new; professors in all classes do this to open up class discussion and prevent certain students from dominating the class and to encourage other students to participate. I did it in my own classes. Two, the professors were not asking those students to never speak; the idea is to get them to step back a little and allow useful discussion to foment. This is a useful life skill, too; when you collaborate on a scrum team or participate in a team meeting, everyone hates the know-it-all guy who talks over everyone and answers everything before anyone else can get a word in edgewise.
Harvey Mudd College needs to have a class about Tina Huang, MIT class of 1993’s lawsuit against Twitter.
And then ask themselves is a tiny technical school , smaller than a high school making a dent? NO. UCLA, Berkeley, are the big guns out there for computer sciences, with UC San Diego, San Jose State, Cal Poly in both locations and UC Davis educating the BULK of CS majors along with MIT, and UIUC and UT Austin and Georgia Tech, as well as UW Seattle. What Harvey Mudd says or does is a blip on the graph and changes nothing.
Look at Facebook carefully and ask yourself why would technical women just say NO? Its run by two Harvard econ majors with banking knowledge who write books to tell younger women to LEAN IN while they rake in the dough! PLEASE Harvey Mudd understand that taking more and more girls only makes the problem more compelling as these girls land at Twitter and are the only girl in the room and do not know how to talk to boys. We need a lot more education across gender boundaries NOW at all schools including Harvey Mudd College. We need to understand male environments if we are to work in one, so gender balancing may not really help at all. How many Mudders take the highest jobs of the land in CS? The $200,000 plus jobs teaching discrete math at Georgia Tech or Any very high up Silicon Valley job? Harvey Mudd education or MIT does not matter, getting along with men is the only skill that matters in Silicon Valley right now. LIGHTEN UP on hard grading and teach girls to talk and get along with boys, whatever it takes. Ask the likes of Carley Fiorina and other female high tech formers to WRITE THE CLASS. OK, choose a more successful manager we have a lot now. Academics need to GET IN THE FIELD, aka Facebook and Twitter and then teach girls how to cope. Off soap box.
Back on Soap Box: Its not about which school on learns CS . look at who makes big dollars in Silicon Valley. They are men who often dropped out of Carnegie Mellon, I know three at least! . They are men who are freshman at Georgia Tech and work all night long on start ups . they are men who graduated Stanford, and coded on the side since their days at a Palo Alto high school, OR They are Harvard and Warton B school grads, (Men plus the Lean in Girl) who run the place. Women need a class about how to do it. They do not need sugar coating classes suitable for Claremont McKenna kiddos! They do not need to be given a line of goods by academics who want so badly the numbers to improve. Women in high tech need both a backbone and they need some help about how to deal with a roomful of men. May I suggest good perfume and knowledge of the meeting content and goals both? A solid technical grasp and a sense of humor so you can roll with sexual inuendo? A balancing hobby like YOGA and impecable standards, as sleeping to the top may not work anymore?! And a public speaking class to avoid a whining female voice? The biggest inhibitor to female success is lack of knowledge of how the system works. We have written books in the 1970s on this, have we forgotten all we learned?
This quote is from Coloradomama above: “May I suggest good perfume and knowledge of the meeting content and goals both? A solid technical grasp and a sense of humor so you can roll with sexual inuendo? A balancing hobby like YOGA and impecable standards, as sleeping to the top may not work anymore?! And a public speaking class to avoid a whining female voice?”
This is exactly what we should aspire to teach our children!!! LMAO!!!
My daughter was accepted to some of the holy grail schools listed above and chose Mudd. She’s rocket star intelligent and doesn’t need a class to talk to boys, yoga so she can bend over attractively, perfume so she can attract men, sultry voice training, or a class on sexual innuendo!
Unbelievable, do you hear yourself? I do not know any girl with the stats needed to get into Mudd that would consider it appropriate to show up at a meeting without “knowing the content and goals” of the meeting.
“Sleeping to the top doesn’t work anymore”… WOW! That comment is so sexist, it’s simply embarrassing for you to have put it in print.
By the way, regarding the “impecable standards” you discuss… IMPECCABLE HAS 2 Cs.
Lots of money does not usually equate with personal success or happiness!
However if that is the premise above, according to business insider Harvey Mudd college grads have the second highest starting salaries in the country.
I own a successful business and I would never want my employees displaying sexist, racist, or other behaviors which are not only wrong, but would decrease productivity and diminish team cohesiveness.
The right thing to do is not roll back in time where women have to pander to men’s sexual appetites, but rather move forward to men and women being equal. Equality puts the best people in the best jobs… we should all work towards that goal.
Once there are more women in the field, the culture will change. It changed in Medicine, it should change in CS.
Have you ever MET a Harvey Mudd woman? Most spent a good portion of their years prior to Mudd in strongly male dominated science activities like FIRST Robotics and engineering camps. Trust me… they can hold their own, and they all know how to talk to males. My own kid had issues in HS with another student grabbing tools out of her hand when she was working on the part of their robot that she was assigned to maintain (he was not). She solved it by putting a wrist strap on the tool, and keeping it in her pocket when she wasn’t using it. When she goes to the coffee shop near our house with a Physics GRE book, man after man (mostly older, engineering types) come up and hit on her. She is very adept at turning them away. She is also adept at letting men assume she is not very smart or skilled in her major area; she happens to be very pretty, and the going in assumption of men seems to be that she is incompetent. She lets them prattle on for a moment, then drops a few pithy, knowledgeable statements that stop them dead. They reassess, then treat her more respectfully. I have watched her do it, and it is pretty great.
Mudd women know they are going into male dominated professions, too. They aren’t ignorant of this. My own kid is applying to Physics grad schools. Typically the schools she is applying to have 10% female faculty, and 10-20% of the new women PhD students last year were women.
And sleeping your way to the top? It has never worked as far as I have seen. I work as a consultant and at a lot of companies over the years, so I have seen a lot. Most commonly when a woman sleeps with a guy at work, she ends up leaving and he stays. I saw women get let go after relationships at work ended, and just last week learned that a women laid off in the IT dept I work in was essentially let go last month because she was sleeping with one of the male married directors. It has really never been a winning strategy to get promoted. Maybe a strategy to marry the boss (I"ve seen that done a couple of times). But not to get promoted within the company.
I am a successful woman in IT, and guess what? I don’t wear perfume, only take yoga because it helps my strength and balance, and have no tolerance for sexual innuendo. Competence and professionalism are my calling cards, and they work. Yesterday one of those male technical managers told me I am “swell to work with”. I’ve earned credibility with the “tech boys” at my clients, and didn’t need to snuggle up or bat my eyes at them to them to do it.
I have to address the suggestion that colleges should be providing women with “a public speaking class to avoid a whining female voice.” My D was a very successful debater in high school and got her share of sexist comments on ballots. I particularly remember one hotly contested semi-finals round that she lost 1-2 where one of the judges lectured her on being “overly aggressive and strident” while simultaneously praising the male team for being “strong and persuasive.” That judge was a middle aged woman and the other two judges were college aged males. (It’s common that judges at debate tournaments are either college student aged ex-debaters or middle aged teachers and parents.) The comments of the two male judges were all about the strength and weaknesses of her argument. The woman judge was clearly bothered by D’s style. As a middle aged woman myself, I found it sad to see time and time again that some of the most sexist comments on ballots came from MY peers. In addition to the “strident” and “overly aggressive” comments she was told at various times she was wearing too much or too little makeup, too loud a color of nail polish, and should wear a skirt suit instead of a pantsuit. Every one of these criticisms came from an older woman judge. Debate taught my D to speak with confidence and present an argument supported by facts and logic. It taught her to look the audience directly in the eye. It taught her to slow down and not not get so wound up you talk too fast. These are great skills. But when someone starts to tell a female not to be “whiny” or “strident” or “hysterical” then I think those comments clearly cross the line into sexism. Fortunately I think the younger generation is more aware of these prejudices.
And can I ask what is meant by “sugar coating classes suitable for Claremont McKenna kiddos”? I’m not even sure where that comment is going.
Yeah, I wondered about the CMC comment, too. My kid has taken a few classes there (mostly lit classes, which is her secondary concentration) and has found them challenging and interesting.
I suspect the poster mixed up “Claremont McKenna” (one of the Claremont Colleges) with “Claremont” (as a whole), though I’m mystified by the comment as well. Classes are the Claremont Colleges are NOT sugar coated — and especially not at Mudd (the original point of discussion) which has a reputation for being very challenging even for the top-notch students they attract.
I think it’s great that Mudd is looking at new ways to attract women to CS (and all sciences for that matter). And I think it’s just as important for the men as the women that there is class balance.
As for the impact of a school “smaller than a high school” – they are seen as a leader in many ways and the article states “Harvey Mudd’s revamped curriculum has been adopted by other schools,”.
Woah… @Coloradomama your comments are extremely disappointing…another example of women putting down other women. We don’t live for men, nor do we ever plan to. “Whiny female voice”?! What’s wrong with you? “need a backbone”…need a backbone? Women have some of the strongest backbones on the planet…are you kidding me? We have to deal with 10x more sh*t than anyone else?! “may I suggest a knowledge of meeting content and goals”…what…the…fuu…
Okay…Mudd women are more than competent, downright impressive. Many women in tech have had to deal with constant underestimation and degradation almost their entire lives. Nothing is just handed to them. They’ve had to fight for respect. So you can bet your a** they’re competent and extremely passionate for what they do. Why would someone deal with all of this…including your comments…if they didn’t give a cr*p?!
@Coloradomama Using Swarthmore’s data pulled from the NSF, since they have no stake in the results. They analyze the top undergrad PhD producers in STEM and other areas. If you scroll down the pages you will see PDFs of undergrad to PhD success rates for numerous disciplines. This is done by percentage. Harvey Mudd comes out at the top, well #2. So you are waaaaaay off. Look closely at the actual schools that send people on to succeed at PhDs and you may be surprised.