Maintaining Diversity in Computer Science in the Face of Capacity Limitations Eric Roberts Clayman Institute for Research on Gender March 5, 2015

A Noteworthy Anniversary

My Life Prior to Wellesley In the 1970s, I lived in a bifurcated world: It became painfully clear that the opportunities open to the men I knew in my academic work were far greater than those open to the women with whom I shared my political energies. Academically, I was deeply involved in computer science. Politically, I was deeply committed to feminism. I decided to try to remedy the situation by setting up a computer science program at a women’s college and ended up taking a position at Wellesley in

The Success of the Wellesley Program In its first three years, Wellesley produced an average of 15 computer science graduates each year, which was enough to create a measurable change in the percentage of women taking positions in the computing industry in Massachusetts. One of my first students at Wellesley was Amy Pearl, who went on to get a Master’s degree in computer science here at Stanford before becoming a leading member of the Java team at Sun Microsystems. Amy also authored two reports on the status of women in computer science that were featured as cover stories in the flagship journal of the ACM professional society. Other early graduates went on to take significant positions in industry, and at least two of my students have gone on to academic careers in computer science. Thirty-two years later, the Wellesley department is still producing between 15 and 20 computer science majors each year.

When Did Things Change?

Women Attack Male-Dominated CS Superbowl Sunday, January 1984

The Challenge of Achieving Diversity The percentage of women majoring in computer science is small relative to that of men. Participation by African American, Hispanic, and Native American students is typically even smaller. Statistics on diversity in computer science have not improved in recent years, despite gains in other fields. For women, participation rates declined through most of the 1990s before rebounding slightly at the end of the decade.

At the beginning of the film, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) breaks up with Mark Zuckerberg with a harsh assessment of his character. Erica’s words are neatly reprised at the end by the lawyer Marylin Delpy (Rashida Jones). Neither of these women has anything to do with computers. They represent the “adults” of the film. Even though most images of women in The Social Network are negative, both of the uniformly positive characters are women. Images of Women in The Social Network

The Bermuda Project Bermuda is a small island lying 600 miles east of North Carolina. Its land area is approximately 20 square miles (less than twice the size of the Stanford campus). Its population is 62,000 (roughly the size of Palo Alto) with two public high schools: Berkeley and Cedarbridge. In 1998, Stanford was asked to design a new computer science curriculum for Bermuda’s public secondary schools. The Bermuda curriculum has been extremely successful. Five years after graduation, more than 40% of students who had taken at least two CS courses were working in an IT-related job. Marissa Mayer (now CEO of Yahoo!)

Image of Computing (California) In 1998, sixth-graders in selected California schools were asked to draw their image of a computer professional. The drawings are for the most part aligned with traditional stereotypes:

Images of Computing (Bermuda) In Bermuda, we repeated this experiment after students had taken our courses and got rather different results:

Tsunami or Sea Change? Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science Ed Lazowska Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Eric Roberts Professor of Computer Science and Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education Stanford University NCWIT 10 th Anniversary Summit May 2014

CS Enrollments Are Exploding StanfordMIT University of PennsylvaniaHarvard

Challenges for Stanford Computer science has become increasingly popular, both as a choice of major and as a field for elective study. –CS is now by far the largest major at Stanford. –CS has more majors than the humanities departments combined. –More than 95% of Stanford undergraduates now take at least one CS course. –CS 106A is now the largest course at Stanford by a factor of two..

Top Majors at Stanford (as of July 2012)

Top Majors at Stanford (as of July 2013)

Top Majors at Stanford (as of October 21, 2014) As of the end of , CS has 911 majors, almost three times the size of its next closest rival.

What a Stanford Woman in CS Looks Like With 244 women declared at the end of last year, CS is in a dead heat with Hum Bio for the title of most popular major for women at Stanford.

Challenges for Stanford Computer science has become increasingly popular, both as a choice of major and as a field for elective study. –CS is now by far the largest major at Stanford. –CS has more majors than the humanities departments combined. –More than 95% of Stanford undergraduates now take at least one CS course. –CS 106A is now the largest course at Stanford by a factor of two. The shift in enrollment patterns is starting to threaten Stanford’s traditional balance. The growing student load is putting an unacceptable load on the faculty, lecturers, teaching assistants, and undergraduate section leaders.

The Cyclical Nature of CS Enrollments This decline was caused by a fall in demand after the dot-com collapse This decline was caused by a fall in capacity as colleges and universities found themselves unable to satisfy the demand CS has experienced cyclical enrollments in the past. But cycles are not all the same....

We’ve Been Here Before The situation that Computer Science is likely to face over the next five years is not unprecedented. Much the same situation occurred in the 1980s. In the early 1980s, the availability of personal computers led to an explosion of student interest in computer science. At some universities, student demand doubled in a single year. Unfortunately, universities did not have the capacity to satisfy the growing demand. –Workloads for faculty increased substantially. –Faculty members began to leave for greener pastures. –Replacement faculty were nearly impossible to find. –Graduate students turned away from academic careers.

The Kent Curtis Report

Dick Gabriel’s Proposal for a Software MFA Dick Gabriel Software education today is embodied in Computer Science and Software Engineering programs, supplemented by informal mentoring on the job. I find this approach unsatisfactory. Software development is a performance exhibiting skills developed by an individual—often in groups of teams in order to achieve the scale of software required. In this way, software development is like putting on a play, which requires the skills and performances of a number of people working in tandem on stage and behind the scenes. Such skills can be developed in isolation through practice with other amateurs or even by putting on plays in public without any training at all. But how much faster could talent be developed in a educational program that recognized that writing software has enough of an arts-like performance component that the program was tailored to it? Another apt comparison can be found in the creative writing arts. It is entirely possible to become an extraordinary writer by one’s self, by simply writing and reading, and many excellent writers progress this way. A faster way to gain competence is through a Master of Fine Arts program, which is designed to rapidly increase one’s skills and to get one prepared to bring to bear critical thinking to the process of continuing improvement. Some believe that all aspects of software design and development are really engineering or scientific disciplines where the models of engineering and science apply, and I will not quarrel with them nor try to convince them otherwise.... This proposal is predicated on the belief that being a good software designer and developer requires talent, and that talent can be developed. We explicitly liken the practice of software to the practice of fine art. software wizard prizewinning poet

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