Tag Archive: Expanding the Pipeline
“Expanding the Pipeline” is a regular column in Computing Research News. The column serves both as a vehicle for describing projects and issues related to women and underrepresented groups in computing. The column is guest-authored by individuals who share their insight and experiences from their active participation in programs designed to involve women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in education and research. Patty Lopez is the column editor.
Nancy Amato, Unocal Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, has had a banner year. She is the recipient of two prestigious awards for mentoring, the Habermann and the Harrold/Notkin awards, elected to the CRA Board, and will shortly be CRA-W Co-chair. She exemplifies teaching, research and service excellence in computing.
The CRA-W Borg Early Career Award (BECA) is named in honor of the late Anita Borg, who was an early member of CRA-W and an inspiration for her commitment to increasing the participation of women in computing research. BECA targets women who are relatively early in their careers (at most 8 years post-PhD) with the goal of encouraging active contributions to helping increase the number of women in the computer science and engineering research community. The annual award is given to a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made significant research contributions and who has contributed to her profession, especially in outreach to women. The award recognizes researchers in both academic and industrial/government research lab settings who have had a positive and significant impact on advancing women in the computing research community while serving as exemplary role models.
CRA-W hosted its 11th annual Grad Cohort in Santa Clara, California on April 11 and 12, 2014. Grad Cohort is a two-day workshop that seeks to improve the success and retention of women in computing research. Senior women advise graduate students on research skills, publishing, career stages, internships, networking, and collaborations with presentations, panels, individual mentoring, and by creating professional social networks.
In the last 10 years, the computing community has started paying more attention to the lack of gender diversity in the field. There have been myriad programs introduced to amend the problem, including awareness-raising campaigns, out-of-school and in-school courses, workshops, and camps. At the national level, there are policy movements to include computer science as a high school graduation requirement, new recruitment practices and other organizational reforms introduced at the university and industry levels, and more. Many of these movements have been evaluated, and many have shown promise that they have, or will, make a difference in their local context. However, to understand whether or not all of these interventions, taken together, have actually “moved the needle,” we need to review the longitudinal data. How have girls’ and women’s representation in computing at the various levels changed, if at all, over time? And are we seeing any positive trends?
On February 10-11, 2014, Clemson University catapulted to the forefront of efforts to broaden participation in discipline specific domains. Clemson Computing and Information Technology Department hosted the 1st CRA-W/CDC Broadening Participation in Visualization Workshop (citi.clemson.edu/bpviz2014). The workshop was held at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. This herculean effort of organizing and planning was met with lofty goals, and logistical intricacies that culminated in success, despite the rare hiccup by Mother Nature affectionately known as the polar vortex.
The 2014 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference was held in Seattle, WA, February 5-8, 2014. The conference is the premier event for the Coalition to Diversity Computing (CDC) and presented by CMD-IT. The conference is now in its eighth year but it is now on a yearly cycle. The goal is to bring together a diverse group of technical leaders to lead discussions in the state-of-the art in computing and technology. The Tapia conference has a tradition of providing a supportive networking environment for under-represented groups of students and professionals, across the broad range of computing and information technology, from science to business to the arts to infrastructure.
On April 11-12, the 1st National Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) conference (http://www.wicys.net) to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, will provide an exclusive opportunity to bring together women students, faculty, professionals, and researchers in cybersecurity from academia, industry, research, and government organizations in efforts aimed at increasing the pipeline of women security professionals and improving the diversity of our cybersecurity workforce.
On November 16, 2013, in Denver, CO, the Broader Engagement (BE) Program at the Supercomputing conference opened its doors the day before SC13 to begin this year’s growing event. Kicking off the workshop, three key inclusion activities provided a solid introduction for newcomers to the SC experience.
Startup non-profit Code.org is working to make inroads into one of the most gaping holes in education. Out of all students taking advanced math and science courses at the K-12 level, only two percent are studying computer science, despite the fact that over half of all STEM jobs are in computing. Code.org founders, tech entrepreneurs Ali and Hadi Partovi, saw something wrong with this picture. The organization’s first project, a short film on the importance of learning computer programming, went viral. Now, Code.org is advancing with long-term policy and education initiatives to bring computer science to all K-12 schools — and a campaign this December to get 10 million students to try it out.
On March 6, 2013, the day before the SIGCSE 2013 Symposium in Denver, Colorado, the CRA-W provided a full-day Career Mentoring Workshop for Educators (CMW-E) for women faculty and graduate students interested in teaching careers. Specifically, the workshop targeted women faculty early in their career who are in teaching-track or teaching-focused positions or female graduate students close to finishing their PhD who are interested in such teaching positions. By co-locating with SIGCSE, the attendees are encouraged to stay to attend the SIGCSE Symposium.
In the US, increasing the number of students who matriculate, graduate, and enter the workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields—in particular, computing—is a national imperative. My 15 years of experience with MentorNet (http://www.mentornet.org), an online program that matches undergraduate and graduate students in STEM disciplines with working professionals and guides them through a one-on-one mentoring relationship for eight months, demonstrates that individuals can help to diversify and develop the next generation of computer scientists. You too can become a mentor and grow professionally and personally—not to mention have fun—while doing good.
