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<p>There are still relatively few women in tech. Maria Klawe wants to change that. As president of Harvey Mudd College, a science and engineering school in Southern California, she's had stunning success getting more women involved in computing.</p>
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<p>Klawe isn't concerned about filling quotas or being nice to women. Rather, she's deeply troubled that half the population is grossly underrepresented in this all-important field. </p>
<h1>Much of this might sound pretty basic, but the approach is highly unusual in higher education, and the efforts have paid off. At Mudd, about 40 percent of the computer science majors are women. That's far more than at any other co-ed school.</h1>
<p>And then look at the last part of the story:</p>
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<p>Klawe is now working on a new project — a massive open online course, or MOOC, aimed at 10th-graders. It's just one more way the president of Harvey Mudd hopes to get more women at the technology table.</p>
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<p>I think Harvey Mudd and prestige in general has something to do with it. Although you may have more than of a female balance in this school, most other lower tier tech/stem schools are still heavily populated by males. Due its name , they receive more and more (quality) applications from aspiring females looking for a stem degree. They have that kind of power and flexibility to accept these female applicants while other schools do not since they don’t receive the type of candidates that Mudd does.</p>
<p>I think reaching a critical mass of women in a college environment then helps to draw in more women in the future. My D will be a freshman at Mudd next year, and definitely liked the more balanced gender pool of both professors and students she found compared to other schools she looked at (both STEM and the department she was interested in at non-STEM schools). She attended a summer program at another STEM school that was much more heavily male weighted, and found the hazing/generally insensitive & annoying male population pretty distasteful. I think she was ultimately sold on Mudd when we went on a tour of the physics department, and two different female professors showed off their physics labs and the work they were doing. She saw that she would have female (and male) friends, and some great female role models and mentors. She was certainly well qualified for entrance, her test scores were above Mudd’s 50% mark across the board. So I certainly don’t think they gave anything up by admitting her.</p>
<p>However, I don’t believe that Mudd is able to do this just because of their prestige. My D had never heard of Mudd before we stopped in while visiting Pomona on the same day. We are not from the west coast – Mudd doesn’t have a ton of prestige in our part of the country. Mudd has made a choice to go down this path. Other schools could certainly do the same. They may not get the highest performing women, but… those other schools aren’t always getting the highest performing men, so I am not sure what the point is.</p>
<p>Good for Mudd! I agree no one around here has heard of the school, so it is not all prestige. I believe Carnegie Mellon has been working on increasing women in CS also. So we will both have D’s in Claremont next year, intparent!</p>
<p>Maria Klawe gave a lecture at the University of Washington regarding her efforts to get more women in computer science (we get the UW channel on cable) and here is how she increased the number of women. </p>
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<li><p>All freshman at Harvey Mudd have to take a CS class. They have made the classes more woman friendly by keeping the super stars from monopolizing the classroom discussion. If there is a male student who is really excited about CS and monopolizes all the discussion, the females might be too intimidated to speak up and there might not be anything to speak up about because the male answered everything. If the professor happens to see the male student out of class, he/she will let him know that he/she is really excited the student is so interested in CS and the professor would be happy to discuss CS during office hours. Then the professor lets the student know that others in the class need to be able to participate in the discussion. In addition, the classes have more group work which makes it more enjoyable for the females.</p></li>
<li><p>If a female is doing well in CS, the professor will let her know that she did so well in that class, and seemed to enjoy it, that she might really like the next class in the sequence. That gives her some self-confidence to try the next class. Encouraging the woman students plays a huge role in increasing their numbers.</p></li>
<li><p>If the female is pre-med, and doing well in CS, she is told how few students actually make it into med schools. She is also told how few jobs there are in biology if she doesn’t make it into med school. She is then told how many CS jobs are available. (This one seems very harsh to me.) </p></li>
<li><p>Females are invited to attend a computer conference during the summer (I don’t remember if this is before their freshman year or after). The goal is to get them to see that there are woman in CS fields and a lot of them connect with the working women and they become their mentors or at the very least contacts for the future.</p></li>
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<p>In addition, she is working with tech companies to make them more woman friendly. Judging from some of the questions in the audience, I didn’t get the feeling that top high tech companies treated women employees very well.</p>
<p>I’m sure that’s way more than you wanted but I thought the lecture was very interesting and liked what she was trying to do.</p>
Sorry, but technically, unless there is a shortage of people entering these fields (and there seems to be some debate about that, per another thread), there isn’t a need for more women in STEM fields. Admirable enough what they are trying to do to increase women in the field, but needed? Not really.</p>
<p>sylvan, I work in the IT industry and have had many different clients/projects over the years, and I disagree with you. Technical groups of almost all one gender tend to be quite disfunctional and less productive. The types of disfunction are different in a mostly male group from a mostly female one. But a more balanced gender mix almost always results in higher productivity and a more pleasant workplace in my experience. I hate coming in and seeing that the group I will work with is heavily weighted one way or the other. It is more frequently heavily male weighted, being IT. There are exceptions – but my experience is that women are better communicators both within the team and across teams, are more likely to think before they act (“ready - aim - fire” vs. “ready - fire - aim”), leave a better audit trail of their activities, and are willing to admit when they are wrong vs. blustering through when they really have no idea. Most tech teams could use a few more members with those qualities, IMHO.</p>
<p>Perhaps it may seem harsh, but it is largely true that getting into medical school is nowhere near a sure thing, and the job market for biology majors is generally poor (although the CS job market prospects can fluctuate wildly with industry cycles).</p>
<p>My son at Brown reports that close to half the students in his CS classes are female. It doesn’t seem like there is a shortage of women considering the major, but perhaps many ultimately decide they prefer something else.</p>
<p>D reports 100% females in her CS classes!! (couldnt resist) - but glad she is at a women’s college since it looks like she will declare CS end of fall term this year - she went in thinking BioChem and has no CS background - I would hate for her to have to compete with the guys who have been dabbling in it for years by the time they get to college. Not to say there aren’t plenty of girls who have been dabbling in CS prior to college, but I think where she is will be very good for her.</p>
<p>I wonder if Brown’s pass/fail option helps. My D would have liked to experiment with CS in college, since there was no decent CS class in high school, but was a little afraid of taking her first class in the subject at the university level.</p>
There is a need for women in STEM fields. In certain fields they are underrepresented. </p>
<p>I’ve had multiple first hand experiences being the minority of the minority. Going to physics workshops and engineering lectures and seeing time and time again that there is about 60-70% guys with girls scattered about the place. It’d be great to see more girls in these fields.</p>
<p>Maybe there are less women in these areas because they are actually more interested in doing something else.</p>
<p>I would rather have 100% of the people in a job area that they are passionate about and excel at rather than 50% of them there because they are recruited just because of their skin color, sex , nationality, etc.</p>
Luckily, this isn’t a real world situation and the women, minorities, Americans, etc. that are recruited will be passionate or at least interested.</p>
<p>One underlying message that does not seem to be addressed here is that the example of Harvey Mudd contradicts an implied message that girls are expected to stay away from STEM majors or might do poorly. </p>
<p>Harvey Mudd is not a run of the mill LAC. Its natural counterpart and direct competitor --minus the graduate school-- is none other than Caltech. The self-selecting pool of applicants yields some of the highest scorers and most qualified students in the country. And then the school makes the student pay for their decision to accept an offer by working them to death. Obviously, other schools place the same expectations on their enrolled students, and HMC is not unique in expecting a lot from its small pool of students.</p>
<p>So, here you have. One of the very best teaching STEM school is reaching out to girls, and they respond by enrolling and … doing extremely well in perhaps the toughest and most rigorous academic environment in the nation. </p>
<p>Having a younger sister, I have known this for a long time: there isn’t a challenge a girl could not overcome. If she wanted to! :)</p>
<p>Not sure as most colleges allow students to take a few elective classes on a pass/fail basis. </p>
<p>Only thing different about Brown is that one can also take major/minor/all courses pass/fail if desired. Oberlin had the same policy when I attended. </p>
<p>However, in practice, I knew of no one who decided to take all or even most of their major/minor courses pass/fail because of concerns regarding grad school admissions and employers who may look dimly on students whom they perceived as doing pass/fail because they wanted to slack off during their college years. </p>
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<p>While they did the first part right by speaking with the monopolizer, they also need to teach students easily intimidated by such monopolizers strategies for dealing with such type-A personalities as they will come across these types in many areas of life. Especially if they plan to work in the computer technology industry where there is a culture of “out-nerding” one another in STEM/techie skills in many areas. </p>
<p>Moreover, there are plenty of type-A conversational monopolizers who are women as well. Saw quite a few in action at some previous workplaces, my undergrad, and more.</p>