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CMU's push to put more females in computer science is paying off
Friday, August 20, 1999 By Bill Schackner, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Jobs abound and the starting salaries would make most college students salivate. Even so, Jennifer Kimura's friends weren't exactly thrilled that the Honolulu teen-ager planned to enroll at one of the nation's leading computer science campuses.
Computing is a male world, they warned. One friend told her to get ready for "dorky guys chasing me around and stuff."
Kimura rejected the conventional wisdom and will begin her studies next week as a freshman in Carnegie Mellon University's computer science school. And she won't lack female classmates after all.
That's because Carnegie Mellon is about to achieve what would have seemed out of the question just a few years ago. It plans to enroll a freshman class of computer science majors that is 37 percent female, up from 8 percent in 1995.
In four years, a campus with a dismal record of attracting women to its computer science program has managed to double its number of female applicants and nearly triple the percentage who choose to enroll -- even as the U.S. Department of Education reports women are bringing home a declining share of computer science degrees from colleges across the country.
Experts say Carnegie Mellon's changing approach to how it recruits women and how it teaches them about computing could have wide implications, given its standing among computer science programs.
Other elite campuses will be watching to see if the school is as good at retaining those women as it has been in attracting them.
"If they can sustain it, I think it will be a real example for other institutions," said C. Dianne Martin, a program director with the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., who specializes in computer science education.
Eric Roberts, associate chairman of the computer science department at Stanford University, wanted to know one thing about Carnegie Mellon's female enrollees: "Will they finish?"
Experts say the shortage of women in computing is more than a problem of gender equity. It has made it harder to fill positions in some of the hottest technical fields. In programming alone, several hundred thousand jobs now go begging, according to some estimates.
Women bring different perspectives that could help the discipline's evolution, and their absence means those ideas aren't being tapped, Martin and others say.
More than half of U.S. college students are women and they are becoming more common in some scientific fields. But the story has been different in computer science.
Women account for barely 20 percent of the enrollment in many top programs and in some cases substantially less. Even with the freshman gains, women majoring in computer science remain far outnumbered overall at Carnegie Mellon, though their total share has grown from 8 percent to 21 percent in four years.
Some blame the lag on the fact that young girls weren't encouraged to experiment with computers. All the software aimed at young males, much of it involving shoot-'em-up violence, doesn't entice females.
Nor does the stereotypical image of a computing student as a junk food-gobbling male hacker who pecks at his keyboard until dawn.
"It's a turn-off," said Charles Van Loan, chairman of the computer science department at Cornell University, where women make up about 16 percent of the majors.
Women see computers "as a tool they need to know about, but not necessarily as a career," agreed Sharon Schuster, president of the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.
So how does a school attract female hackers?
At Carnegie Mellon, the effort grew out of some soul searching on a campus that was far from a model in removing gender barriers. Women on the science-heavy campus make up 34 percent of the general student population, but in computing, men outnumber women by more than 10 to 1.
"I would call it a gradual dawning process. Around 1993 and 1994, I began to ask myself what can we do?" said Allan Fisher, associate dean for undergraduate education in the school of computer science.
Fisher and colleague Jane Margolis received research funding to study what gets men and women interested in computers and what factors influence whether they stick with the field. The school began to make changes based on what they found.
Recruiters decided to make more visits to schools with strong math and science programs, including those with all or mostly female student bodies, said Michael White, an associate director of admissions.
The campus made a more aggressive push to contact promising females and let them know financial aid was available -- regardless of whether they had shown any interest in Carnegie Mellon.
In deciding who to admit, the school began focusing more attention on signs of math and science talent rather than on simply how many computer programs an applicant had written.
A survey by Fisher and Margolis of Carnegie Mellon students turned up a gap in computer ownership. Nearly every male already had one when he arrived, but only one in seven females did, and it was that disparity the school decided to keep in mind.
"We said what we are really looking for are students with the highest ability, the greatest likelihood of succeeding in college, the most creativity, the strongest leadership skills -- not 'Has this kid written 50,000 lines of code?' " Fisher said.
Faculty were encouraged to work harder to show that computer science is not just about programming but has wide application in everything from scientific research and business to the performing arts.
Fisher said faculty also are aware of research showing that women arrive on campus with less confidence than men and thus can be affected by a confusing lecture or assignment in ways men are not.
"Women will experience a problem or not understand something and they will blame themselves. Men will experience a problem, not understand something, and they will blame you," Fisher said. "The women are far more likely to conclude that they just don't have what it takes, lose interest and disappear."
School administrators hope that as women become a bigger part of each year's freshman class, networks of female mentors will help ease those doubts.
But role models may continue to be scarce. As is true at other schools, students learn computer science at Carnegie Mellon from a mostly male faculty. The field's celebrated stars include few women.
"I would like to see somebody out there that I could look at and say, 'Wow, she did it,' " said Carnegie Mellon junior Gunisha Madan. "When you think about all the multimillionaires in computing, you can't think of many females."
Some say it's surprising there aren't more high-profile women in the field. The industry is little more than a half-century old, and the barriers that have kept women away should not be as embedded as in older fields, Martin said.
In fact, women were doing groundbreaking work in programming as early as the 1940s, when World War II siphoned men away from the job market.
Grace Hopper and her staff developed the first programming language that used English, a breakthrough that paved the way for COBOL, a pioneering computer language for businesses. She is credited on the Internet with coining the words "bug" and "de-bug," common terms used to discuss computer problems.
But males soon came to dominate the field, a gender gap that grew wider as enrollment overall in computer science began to wane in the 1980s, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.
Women's share of bachelor's degrees in computer and information sciences, which peaked at 37 percent in 1984, was down to 27 percent by 1996. Doctoral degrees awarded to women in the field were even more scarce, at 14 percent in 1996.
Now, with many computing schools reporting a general resurgence in undergraduate study, educators are trying to bring a greater share of women back into the fold.
At Stanford University, where freshmen do not declare a major, efforts have focused on an introductory course in computer science. Over the past four years, the share of women taking it has grown to 33 percent, Roberts said.
At the University of California at Berkeley, the school has established a Web site that new female students can use and is putting them in touch with women already affiliated with the department.
At Carnegie Mellon, Fisher and Margolis have led summer programs for high school teachers from around the country aimed at finding ways to make the discipline more appealing to their female students.
For Kimura, the appeal to study computing was already there, but where to pursue a degree was up in the air.
She attended a private high school, scored 1,400 on her Scholastic Aptitude Test and graduated with honors near the top of her class. As she and her family mulled her future, unsolicited campus mailings piled up at home from schools across the country, including a recruiting brochure from Carnegie Mellon.
She was accepted at Wellesley College, the University of Southern California, Boston College and the University of Hawaii.
But she liked Carnegie Mellon's engineering strength, the fact that it had its own computer science department and its reputation for pairing computer studies with other disciplines such as music and dance.
She also got some financial aid: a presidential scholarship that will cut her tuition by roughly one-half, to $11,000 a year, if she remains in good standing.
Kimura said many of her classmates in honors courses in high school were male, so life in a male bastion would not be a new experience.
Besides, computer science is just too interesting, she said. "And the money is there."
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