The American Association of University Women recently released a comprehensive study documenting the status of women in computing and engineering fields and offering recommendations on how to increase the number of women in these disciplines. Women make up small percentages of all students in degree programs in these fields and are vastly underrepresented in the professional workforce.
The report offers a wide variety of statistics on women engineers and computer sciences in the workplace and in the academic world. The report singles out Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. An entire chapter of the AAUW report documents the steps the college has taken to boost the number of women in computing and engineering degree programs. The college increased the percentage of women graduating from its computing program from 12 percent to approximately 40 percent in five years.
The report, Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing, may be downloaded here.
Below is a video showing the authors discussing the major findings of their research.
Good presentation. I’ll highly recommend it to my students. In the next edition, consider including minorities as presenters. We can’t be trying to deal with the problem of non or little representation of women while we project the image of exclusion.