Woman Engineer/College President
Dear Friends of Women in Science,
There's a great role model for young women interested in engineering and computer science in my own backyard. One of the five Claremont Colleges, undergraduate colleges that have adjacent campuses and allow extensive cross-registration of students, Harvey Mudd College, specializes in engineering. They selected Maria Klawe as their President in 2006. Few women were majoring in computer science and men far outnumbered women in both engineering and computer science. As we've noted before, although women were 37% of Computer Science majors nationally in 1985, that proportion had dropped to 22% by 2005, shocking the number crunchers at National Science Foundation. What Klawe has accomplished at Harvey Mudd College is spectacular.
Under her leadership, the incoming class is over half women for the first time. She has personally encouraged both applicants and women who have already arrived. One of her self-imposed tasks is to memorize the face and name of each incoming student, so she can greet each student she meets on campus by name. But that's not enough. She also talks with women about the need for more women in engineering and computer science. In a New York Times article by Katie Hafner on April 2, 2012, she's quoted as saying that she likes to "convert" students to computer science.
HMC professors also revamped their entry level CS class. To reduce the intimidation factor, the course was divided into two sections - "gold," for those with no prior experience, and "black" for everyone else. Java, a notoriously opaque programming language, was replaced by a more accessible language called Python. And the focus of the course changed to computational approaches to solving problems across science. "We realized that we needed to show students computer science is not all about programming," said Ran Libeskind-Hadas, chairman of the department. "It has intellectual depth and connections to other disciplines."
So here is some good news about women in science!
cheers,
Laura
http://www.nature.com
Thanks for sharing this story, Laura! I'm glad to learn more about Maria Klawe. When I talk about why there are so few women in science and engineering, I frequently am asked to explain the decline in women's representation in computer science. It's a tough question, and Maria Klawe is clearly someone making progress in turning the trend around. Thanks for highlighting her work in this forum.
Christi
