Mentoring Mentors Overview

The Mentoring Mentors program, focuses on supporting and creating a larger community of mentors that is representative of women and gender-marginalized students, particularly Black, Latinx, and Native/Indigenous individuals, in computing undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs. Recognizing the urgent need to address the underrepresentation, the program aims to support faculty and researchers as they mentor future populations of women and gender-marginalized students entering computing programs.

CRA Taulbee survey data from the 2020-2021 academic year indicates that only 23.3% of computer science PhD graduates identified as women, and 68.7% of those women were nonresidents. There is an urgent need to increase representation within the field. Computing researchers shape the technology that is built and implemented in the US and beyond, and if researchers aren’t representative of society, we’re not only sacrificing potential technological innovations and their accompanying economic benefits, but we are also at risk of causing irreparable harm to vast segments of society. 

The Mentoring Mentors program will specifically focus on providing professional develop through the webinar series, and creating community support groups for faculty & student mentors through canvas.

To accomplish this, the Mentoring mentor program will be implemented in two parts:

• Part 1: We will host our Mentoring Mentors Workshop as a series of online sessions, spread over several days, in alternate years to the in-person CMWs, to allow participation by people with family responsibilities, disabilities or who otherwise cannot travel.
• Part 2: Offer our Mentoring Mentors program directly to faculty, postdocs and graduate students in departments and labs.

Mentoring Mentors is managed by CRA’s Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research (CRA-WP).