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Pacesetters

NCWIT Pacesetters: Setting an Accelerated Pace for Increasing Women's Participation

NCWIT Pacesetters is a fast-track program in which senior executives from universities and corporations commit to increasing their numbers of technical women. Pacesetters organizations work to recruit previously untapped talent pools of technical women and retain women who are at risk of leaving, resulting in "net new" women for their organizations. Together, Pacesetters seek to add 1,000 net new women to the U.S. tech talent pool by 2012.

Pacesetters are using new and innovative change strategies to reach their goals. Read their profiles below to learn more about individual Pacesetters organizations, and click on their strategies to find out more about these approaches.

Pacesetters Profiles:

At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, our students in computer science and software engineering expressed interest in learning more technologies in context and application, beginning very early in their major. In 2010 we revised our first-year course selections, so that now students can choose from introductory computing courses such as Game Design, Mobile App Development, Robotics, Music Composition, and Computational Art. These new courses reflect the evolution of computing instruction by giving students choices in their introductory class, teaching "algorithmic thinking", using context to draw students in and keep their interest, and implementing project-based learning in a group environment. Our evaluators are looking at recruitment, retention, and learning outcomes but initial results show that this approach has been especially popular and effective with female students.

Cal Poly also has emphasized opportunities for women in computing to develop visibility for themselves and the field. Our Computer Science Department promotes the women in computing student club, runs a speaker series, and established a mentoring mechanism for female students. The department supports female students attending the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, and will be hosting an NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing affiliate for high school girls. Women in computing majors are visiting their former high schools, using NCWIT road show materials to ignite the passion of prospective students.

IBM has a long-standing focus on innovation and we believe diversity is a competitive advantage. At IBM we leverage our differences to create innovations that matter and drive the best results for our clients.

Our Technical Women's Pipeline Program is a career framework and networking community for our technical innovators that support women's growth and advancement. As part of the Technical Women's Pipeline Program IBM assigns each participant a long-term technical role model and an executive sponsor, who actively coach and mentor her to be an innovator. IBM creates a set of targeted activities and learning opportunities tailored to each participant. These include creating an annual actionable development plan with measurable goals, and developing a promotion package to ensure the candidate continues to progress in her career. Participants receive a career roadmap tailored for their specific needs, and have opportunities for visibility and development through temporary assignments, job shadowing, and other experiential learning opportunities. Regular checkpoints between the IBMer, her coach, her executive sponsor, and her manager keep the team focused on her development and progress.

At Santa Clara University, we are committed to engaging and retaining young women in our computing programs. We track our female computing majors as they enter their junior year; counting students in their junior year will be a measure of our success in both recruitment and retention. Our goal for fall of 2013 is to have 35% of our computing majors be female.

Santa Clara has implemented a volunteer tutoring program that helps both the tutors and their students. We have increased our support for existing women students by sponsoring several of them to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference each year, along with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology Women of Vision banquet. We host a luncheon for female computing majors on the first day of finals, and we celebrate all of our female engineering students at our "Women in Engineering" dinner every year, where we encourage them to sign up for MentorNet. Each fall Santa Clara tracks the number and gender of students entering and staying in computing majors; likewise, each term that our tutoring program is in place, we track the number of tutor and student pairs, and survey the students about the benefits they feel they've received.

Strategy: Community and VisibilityStrategy: Community and Visibility
Partner with existing groups (company affinity groups, supervisory groups, local community organizations) to offer opportunities that women weren't aware of and to recruit and advance women into computing fields. This may involve efforts to change the image of computing or improving how the organization celebrates women's technical contributions and accomplishments.; First Course ExperienceStrategy: First Course Experience
Improving the first course can appeal to a broader demographic (not just women) by teaching computing in context and showing how computing skills can be is applied to disciplines such as healthcare, disabilities, or the arts. Such introductory courses introduce computational thinking skills (as opposed to just the mechanics of coding), keep students engaged, and increase retention in the major.; In-ReachStrategy: In-Reach
In-reach means looking more closely at the women already on campus and those already working in your company to recruit from the inside. Women already connected to your organization can be motivated to study CS / IT majors or take on variety of technical corporate jobs when they receive direct motivation to do so.; Starting YoungStrategy: Starting Young
Outreach and programs that target middle and high school girls are important because they engage girls before they lose interest or decide to pursue other fields. Programs such as the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing and Dot Diva provide encouragement, inspiration, and community to young women that can influence career decisions.; Tapping New Pools of TalentStrategy: Tapping New Pools of Talent
Sometimes it's helpful to look externally for new pools of talent and introduce them to computing fields and careers. This can include offering new majors or creating interdisciplinary majors that allow students to combine computing skills with a variety of fields that interest them, or providing training to current employees that allows them to switch to a technical track.

Over the last 18 months, the number of women majoring in computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) has increased by 40%. Faculty and staff at the Jack Baskin School of Engineering (JBSOE) have introduced a number of initiatives to encourage greater participation of women in computing on campus. We are reaching out to middle school girls with a summer camp called "Girls in Engineering", which focuses computer science and engineering. Through our participation in the Bay Area Affiliate of the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing, we are encouraging high-school-age young women to pursue computing and establishing UCSC as a women-friendly place to study computing. An outreach "road show" is designed to influence more young women to consider computer science as a college option. Our NSF-funded scholarship program targets financially disadvantaged students, especially women, and includes a unique live-and-learn community and shared curriculum in the first year. We also are reaching out to women already at UCSC through the redesign of an entry-level course and an advertising campaign we call "Project Awesome". Project Awesome is an aggressive "in-reach" program targeting first- and second-year women with brochures mailed to their homes, welcome events on campus, and a website (http://awesome.soe.ucsc.edu) that provides encouragement and incentive to study computing.

At the University of Colorado, the Department of Computer Science is situated within the College of Engineering. While we produce terrific graduates, not all students identify as engineers and our program has endured low enrollments since the dot-com crash and low percentages of female students since the mid-1990s. This is in spite of interest in computer science by the more diverse students of the College of Arts and Sciences who, typically, do not want to take the math and science classes required to transfer to our program. To address these problems, our participation in Pacesetters motivated us to develop a new degree program - the Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science - to be taught by our department but housed in the College of Arts and Sciences. This new degree program is designed to enable what we call "CS + X": the ability to major in computer science and then earn a degree or minor in a second area of study, such as biology or physics. Interest is strong and we are almost through the approval process. If all goes well, we hope to accept students into the new program by Fall 2012.

Strategy: First Course ExperienceStrategy: First Course Experience
Improving the first course can appeal to a broader demographic (not just women) by teaching computing in context and showing how computing skills can be is applied to disciplines such as healthcare, disabilities, or the arts. Such introductory courses introduce computational thinking skills (as opposed to just the mechanics of coding), keep students engaged, and increase retention in the major.; In-ReachStrategy: In-Reach
In-reach means looking more closely at the women already on campus and those already working in your company to recruit from the inside. Women already connected to your organization can be motivated to study CS / IT majors or take on variety of technical corporate jobs when they receive direct motivation to do so.; Starting YoungStrategy: Starting Young
Outreach and programs that target middle and high school girls are important because they engage girls before they lose interest or decide to pursue other fields. Programs such as the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing and Dot Diva provide encouragement, inspiration, and community to young women that can influence career decisions.; Targeting InfluencersStrategy: Targeting Influencers
Faculty, admissions staff, counselors, parents, mentors, managers, and peers are all powerful influencers of women's decisions to enter or stay in a technical career. Influencing the influencers provides an inflection point for causing them to consider their own biases or perceptions, and helping them encourage more women to pursue technical careers.

The Department of Computer Science at UT-Austin set a goal to increase the number of women entering the computer science undergraduate program and, through carefully targeted steps, we were able to double the number of new female students in one year.

First, we set up meetings with admissions to let them know our goals for increasing our numbers. Last year, we requested 40 slots for focused recruiting; this year, we doubled the number of women admitted. In addition, we focused efforts to recruit students from our First Bytes camp, as well as undecided students already in the College. Many faculty members pitched in to encourage students taking our Elements program, which is a set of computer science classes targeted toward non-majors, to consider a computer science major. We provided faculty and student mentoring for first-year women, which helped tremendously with retention. We also offer scholarships sponsored by the National Science Foundation to many of our incoming female freshmen, as well as scholarships for winners of the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. Each of these efforts has impacted our success.

Computer Science at the University of Virginia is committed to an environment where diverse, capable, inspired individuals can collaborate to learn and advance knowledge. Our reasoning is trifold: we wish to be a model in reaping and sharing the benefits of diversity; we seek to enhance our intellectual and creative environment; and we expect to better produce happy, capable, and broadly-educated graduates.

To support our vision we have three undergraduate programs: B.A. and B. S. degrees in Computer Science, and a B.S degree in Computer Engineering. These offerings allow our students flexibility to tailor their education towards their careers goals. We call our "Net New Women" goal 30-30-30. We want female undergraduate and graduate participation in computing to reflect their overall school demographics of 30%. It is also our intention to see the percentage of women faculty exceed 30%. To help us achieve a diverse, well-qualified undergraduate body we actively recruit with career nights and with three first-year course offerings. Although all offerings prepare students for immediate entry into secondary courses, they differ in pedagogy and intended audiences, from the inexperienced to the experienced. These practices are achieving results. Our major graduation rates are projected to climb from a historic high of 15% to over 25% women.

Strategy: In-ReachStrategy: In-Reach
In-reach means looking more closely at the women already on campus and those already working in your company to recruit from the inside. Women already connected to your organization can be motivated to study CS / IT majors or take on variety of technical corporate jobs when they receive direct motivation to do so.; Targeting InfluencersStrategy: Targeting Influencers
Faculty, admissions staff, counselors, parents, mentors, managers, and peers are all powerful influencers of women's decisions to enter or stay in a technical career. Influencing the influencers provides an inflection point for causing them to consider their own biases or perceptions, and helping them encourage more women to pursue technical careers.; Community and VisibilityStrategy: Community and Visibility
Partner with existing groups (company affinity groups, supervisory groups, local community organizations) to offer opportunities that women weren't aware of and to recruit and advance women into computing fields. This may involve efforts to change the image of computing or improving how the organization celebrates women's technical contributions and accomplishments.; First Course ExperienceStrategy: First Course Experience
Improving the first course can appeal to a broader demographic (not just women) by teaching computing in context and showing how computing skills can be is applied to disciplines such as healthcare, disabilities, or the arts. Such introductory courses introduce computational thinking skills (as opposed to just the mechanics of coding), keep students engaged, and increase retention in the major.

University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) created a multi-pronged strategy with the goal of adding "net new" women in computing fields. We targeted female freshman honors students with a new course called "Brave New World: Scientific, Economic and Social Impact of CS". We created popular honors sections in our introductory programming courses with the purpose of engaging smart women and getting some of them to add Computer Science & Engineering to their "might be interested in" list of majors. We coordinated our instructors and support staff to ensure consistent, encouraging communication with students (specifically women) in the Intro the Programming class. Emails sent to high achievers suggested that they consider applying for the major; informational "teas" invited women to network with faculty, students, and staff from the department; and a special women's seminar introduced women to the breadth and depth of CSE by visiting local companies, listening to current student panels, seeing research presentations, and talking about their experiences in the courses. We also are in the early stages of our traveling road show program, in which CSE graduates and undergraduates visit local middle and high schools to show them exciting applications of computer science. The number of women in the University of Washington CSE is about 4% higher now than when we started; since many of our outreach programs target students early in the pipeline, we hope to continue to see our numbers increase over the next few years.

Pacesetters Organizations:

Apple, Inc.

Pacesetters is sponsored by: