>> Rane Johnson: All right everyone, let's get started. I'm really excited today to have a couple
of really exciting talks, but before that I’d like to bring up the Jeannette Wing to give an
introduction.
>> Jeannette Wing: Thank you, Scott. Scott and I agreed that I would introduce Scott and he
would introduce me; so that was Scott. Scott is one of the organizers of this MSR Gender
Diversity Lecture Series, and this is the second of five; and the first one was on implicit bias, and
today you're going to hear from two phenomenal speakers who have been promoting diversity
for all, not just the students, for all in computer science. This title especially speaks to my
dream of computational thinking for all, so I'm sure Jane will have a lot of comments to speak
on that dimension of diversity. I would like to introduce our first Jane and then Maria, and then
they will speak each for about 45 minutes and then there's Q and A after each talk.
Let me just read the script and then go off script as I read the script. So Jane Margolis is an
advocate in ensuring computer science is accessible to all students. She is a Senior Researcher
at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Her focus of research is social
inequities in education, the production of inequality, and how fields become segregated. She's
the author of two award-winning books on underrepresentation in computer science
education. Her 2002 book, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, examines the
gender gap in computer science at the college level; and her 2008 book, Stuck in the Shallow
End: Education, Race, and Computing, examines the disparities in learning opportunities
especially for low income African American and Latino students at the high school level.
So I have known Jane since we were both at Carnegie Mellon University together, and this is
now going off script, and I remember when she and Allan Fisher were writing this book,
Unlocking the Clubhouse, because at the time Carnegie Mellon University's undergraduate
program in computer science was very young. Computer science at Carnegie Mellon existed at
the PhD level since the mid-60s. That was never an issue. I think we all know that. But
surprisingly an official undergraduate program in computer science at Carnegie Mellon did not
start until 1994. And in 1994 seven percent of the undergraduates were female. And through
the efforts of people like Allan Fisher and Jane Margolis and Peter [indiscernible], by 2000 we
got the percentage up to 39. And since then, at Harvard when there was a dip in enrollments
across the country, it hovered around 25 high 20s; but we are back to basically 40 percent,
Carnegie Mellon is. So this is really a phenomenal outlier story that you should ask Jane or me
or Peter about off-line.
So if you haven't read Unlocking the Clubhouse I highly encourage you to read it. Okay; going
back on script. Jane is the principal investigator on several National Science Foundation grants
that address this underrepresentation in computer science. These grants have led to the
creation of Exploring Computer Science, a nationwide curriculum, and teacher of professional
development program focused on equity and inquiry instruction in computer science learning.
Margolis worked for seven years as one of the first female telephone installers in the San
Francisco Bay Area and has a doctorate of education from Harvard Graduate School of
Education. So Jane, thank you for being here and we look forward to what you have to say,
especially in your more recent efforts in Los Angeles.
Our second speaker today needs no introduction, but I will introduce her anyway. Maria Klawe
is passionate about diversity in computer science and Microsoft. She began her tenure as
Harvey Mudd College's first female president in 2006 and is on the Microsoft Board of
Directors. Prior to joining Harvey Mudd she served as dean of engineering and professor of
computer science at Princeton University. Klawe joined Princeton from the University of British
Columbia where she served in various roles, including administrative roles I believe, from 1988
to 2002. Prior to the UBC Maria spent eight years with IBM Research in California and two
years at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD and Bachelors of Science and
Mathematics from the University of Alberta. So she is Canadian. Klawe is a member of the
Board of Microsoft Corporation, Broadcom Corporation, and the nonprofit Math for America, a
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a trustee for the Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute in Berkeley, and a member of both the Stanford Engineering Advisory Council
and the Advisory Council for the Computer Science Teachers Association. She is a recipient of
the 2014 Woman of Vision ABIE, award for leadership and was ranked 17 on the Fortune’s 2014
list of the world's 50 greatest leaders. And so one thing, this is the fun fact that Rane supplied
my with, one thing that people don't know about Maria is after a decade she now has an art
show exhibit at Mountain View and enjoys painting. So Maria, thank you for coming.
Last night a group of us had an informal dinner with Maria and Jane there, and it was a lively
conversation with Maria starting off by giving us the blow-by-blow detail of the Sacha Grace
Hopper Event. So that was the behind the scenes details. So Jane, you’re up.
>> Jane Margolis: Thank you. So I want to thank you all for inviting me. Is the mic on? So I am,
as said in the introduction, I am a social scientist; I'm not a computer scientist. For years I used
to say that I have no technical background and then someone dug into my past and I realized
that I do have some street cred. Right after college I got a summer job as a telephone operator,
If you remember what those are with the plug-in wires in the early 70s, and then Affirmative
Action came and said that the phone company had to get women in traditionally male jobs; and
so they look for volunteers and I volunteered and I became a telephone installer and it was a
life shaping event. I did it for seven years. I loved it. I came from a family that boys and girls
can do everything the same, and then I realized in my early 20s I never was introduced to tools,
I didn't know how to work with tools, I didn't know anything. Those phone closets that you
open up with the wires everything that was just for geniuses and then I realized it’s just color
coding. It's no big deal.
So that experience was totally shaped my life. I'd always wanted to be a teacher or a
psychologist, and after I did that for seven years I ended up going back to graduate school and
my field of interest was on how we get socialized, how fields become segregated, how
inequality is maintained and reproduced, and here I am looking at technology. What a better
place to look at it?
So I did start off at Carnegie Mellon, and it was a wonderful opportunity. I had moved to
Pittsburgh; I was working teaching in Women's Studies; and Allan Fisher, who was the dean at
the time, was looking for someone to research why there were so few women in computer
science. And he was introduced to me as a qualitative researcher and this was really in 1994,
for someone, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon to cross the boulevard to the University
of Pittsburgh and to say to a feminist researcher teaching in Women's Studies, will you help us?
Will you become a visiting research scientist at Carnegie Mellon and help us investigate and
work together and look at why there's been so few women in computer science? And that was
at the time remarkable that he was willing to be that interdisciplinary, put his faith and
collaboration energy with a feminist and a qualitative researcher.
So we proceeded with collaboration with all the faculty, Allan really leading the charge, I did the
research to make changes and Jeannette refer to them and it's in the book Unlocking the
Clubhouse. So I'm not really going to talk about that which was from ’94 to ’99 and is in the
book and a lot of what we found is being carried on, and I'm assuming that Maria is going to
talk about all the changes that are happening at Harvey Mudd, but I do want to talk about some
reflections. And the lessons that I really learned and looking back on it is the value of
interdisciplinary perspectives when you're tackling this issue of underrepresentation and that
change really needs insiders with political will and commitment; and the work never could have
been done if there hadn't been Allan Fisher, who was from the dean of the time, who was
determined to look at this problem and to not just have it be a research report sitting on the
shelf but was going to take action and was going to do something about it. There's one thing
about doing the research and there's the other thing about actually changing the culture and
changing the system.
But I also learned to something else in that increasing gender diversity does not automatically
increase racial diversity. And in that period there was four African-American students and over
the four years that we were researching them two of them dropped out, and that was kind of
equal to the lack of retention for women, but it was more extreme. It was 50 percent. And the
issues ranged from feeling isolated, not fitting in, a real cultural difference, feeling insensitivity,
as women were saying things like you're only here because you're a girl, think of the pressure
that was being felt on these four African-American students; and then the other issues also was
two of the students came from not top high schools and did not have sort of the preparation
and the scaffolding that was really necessary to sit shoulder to shoulder with other people that
came from the very top schools, had been programming since they were eight years old or
whatever, and so they felt that they didn't belong and were not getting the proper supports. So
even while over that four year period of time when we went from 7 percent to 39 percent
females there was not a commensurate increase in racial diversity around African-Americans
and Latinos. And that experience really, I remember saying to Allan if this young lady, which
was one of the African-American students, if she doesn't make it through this program I'm
quitting. She didn't make it; I didn't quit; but I did, when that program was over, commit myself
and my next period of work to looking at the question of why are so few African-American,
Latinos, and female students learning computer science?
And I had the good fortune, bad fortune, or whatever to move to Los Angeles and I did get an
NSF Grant to do a large longitudinal research study in the high schools to look at what was
happening in terms of education in LA public high schools which are mostly low income
students, free and reduced lunch, and largely a Latino population reflecting the population in
the city as well. And just so you know that the Bachelor’s degrees, this was in 2011 and 2012,
African-Americans 4.6, Hispanics, this is nationwide, 6.5, Asians 15 percent, whites 64 percent;
and if you look at California AP computer science participation in California where AfricanAmericans are 7 percent of the student body just 8 females have taken AP computer science
tests, were taking the AP computer science in 2012 and Latinos 52 percent of California
students but only 49 females; and AP computer science is one of the least diverse courses there
is and one of the lowest enrollments as well, but it’s an indicator of how the education is not
having happening prior to college.
So I got an NSF Grant to do another longitudinal study looking at the situation and we did
research in some LA, three schools intensely, but we've looked at the whole district and the
findings are reported in this book, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing.
We interviewed students, we did observations of classrooms, we interviewed principals,
counselors, administrators, intensely observed what was going on in the schools. And the
biggest sort of umbrella finding was that there were greater disparities in learning
opportunities that fell along race and socioeconomic lines so that in schools with higher
numbers of African-American and Latino kids what was called computer science when you
looked at it it was really keyboarding, it was Internet searching, it was word processing, it was
not computer science. And also many of these schools were technology rich but curriculum
poor. In other words there were a lot of computers in those schools. You'd walk in, the room
would shine with equipment, but the curriculum was so poor, the teachers were not there, they
were not getting introduced to computer science. And in the schools that there was a pathway
of courses we did interview in an African-American school, a mostly Latino school, and then a
school in the white wealthy part of Los Angeles, but two thirds of the kids traveled there from
101 different zip codes around the city in search of a good education and they did have a full
pipeline of computer science courses. But when you looked at the AP computer science class
and the other classes it was predominantly male and white and Asian students. There were no
students of color and very few females in those places so that those places, AP computer
science and other computer science, really were sort of claim spaces by a certain narrow group
of kids and were really segregated spaces.
So the question was what to do? We looked at what was going on in these schools and there
were structural inequalities. There’s these interlocking forces: structure inequalities, classes
and teachers, I talked about that, the classes really were not computer science, there were not
teachers that were prepared in computer science because there's nothing, there's no CS
certification pathway; like you can become a math teacher, an English teacher, there's nothing
in computer science. So it was a structural inequalities. There were biased belief systems and
policy and all of these forces interlocked and I'm going to talk about the biased belief system
because right now there is so much discussion about unconscious bias and this was a very, very
true in the high schools.
So the image that a lot of teachers have and students was the image of the CS boy wonder
icons and these images when we would interview students they would talk about Bill Gates,
Steve Jobs, these were the images that the teachers and students carried around in their head
and the issue of gender and race was very paramount in their minds. And a lot of the
interviews revealed that there was this born to do it belief that one of the teachers said you can
just tell a student who is born to do it and who has the natural and innate talent; and they
would go on to describe these the students and how they could really pinpoint them. And the
false attributions from educators were that others were just not interested. And that is what
the deadly curse was. They not only felt that some were born to do it with innate talents,
natural talents, but others are just not interested or capable.
And from students we would hear what do you see as computer science? A dude with some
real classes talking weird and another student said they’ll probably be white or Chinese because
they’re like smart and they like those things. So there was incredible consciousness of race,
gender, and appearance and these students were not seeing themselves in the possibility of
becoming a computer scientist.
But what we’ve found, and we talk about this in the book, is that it's not innate or natural talent
but we have called this preparatory privilege, that a lot of people and the students in the tech
club and the picture that I showed you about who were in the AP computer science classes they
were often kids that came from families with resources that had the ability to introduce them
to computer camps which are quite costly, have a lot of computers at home that they can tinker
with, take apart, have private tutors, and really get a jumpstart into the world, maybe come
from families with engineers or scientist families, all these things that you don't realize are just
laying the foundation and giving someone confidence and a belief in themselves that they can
enter into this field.
And just so people in computer science don’t become defensive like oh, is that me, this
happens everywhere. And I just want to, this is the first time I've shown these photos that I'm
going to show you, and it just is part of the way privilege and inequality happens in our country.
So I'm obsessed with Yosemite. And I don't know if you were following this guy Tommy
Caldwell, these two climbers that went up the sheer face of Half Dome without ropes. I mean
just incredible. And this happened like three months ago and it was all in the paper and
everything. Well, here's Tommy Caldwell, he's almost at the top. What did it take? 19 days or
something, and they were climbing the sheer face. And he had tried it seven times in his
lifetime.
Well, I became really interested and followed it all the time. And then I found this big article
which showed the whole story and here was Tommy Caldwell at seven, and I was going oh, this
is like what I’m talking about with preparatory privilege. Here's Tommy at three with his dad
and here's baby Tommy and it’s the whole family. Mom, dad, and uncle are all really big rock
climbers and just basically they talked about him, they put him on the rocks when he was a
baby and he's been doing it.
Now there's probably a lot of people that as a baby are put in front of computers or sent to
computer camps or put on the rocks and they don't go on to be Tommy Caldwell and climb up
the sharp face. But I am concerned that so many kids who could develop this potential in
becoming Tommy Caldwells and who could really get into rock climbing or into computer
science who don't have that scaffolding, who don't have that preparatory privilege, what are
we doing about that? And what can we do about that?
So our vision after this research was to democratize computer science knowledge to help
transform computer science education so that it is engaging and relevant for students who
have been marginalized by the field. First and foremost we were saying it is not typing and
keyboarding; it is computational thinking, the problem solving, critical thinking, very influenced
by the work of Jeannette Wing and looking at what computer science should be. How can we
democratize this knowledge and bring it to all kids so that everyone has the opportunity to
climb the Half Dome?
And what was needed we decided was an intervention in the schools because that's where the
kids are. There are many programs that do after school in formal education, they set up camps,
they set up special programs. We said we have to go into the schools and the way to do that to
reach the vast majority of kids is we need partnerships with school districts. Now Maria is
totally right. Our public school education, especially in large urban cities is really, this is going
live, everyone's hearing it, I create partnerships with school districts, there's a lot of work that
has to be done, a lot of work; and from the micro issues of just trash in the hallways to macro
issues of the education that's being delivered. I mean so many messages are giving to kids that
they cannot do it or it's not worth it. So we decided to partner with the school districts and
convince them that computer science is computational thinking, it can be relevant to kids, it can
engage their interests, given the opportunity they can become interested and capable.
And to do this a lot of policies had to be changed. Computer science now is not part of the
academic core so it doesn't get tested so it's always the least priority. It has a vocational history
where the technical, it's considered a technical art and you get the same credit when we
started for computer science that you did in floristry, and a lot of the counselors were
channeling girls into floristry and fashion club and not into computer science, and there is no CS
teacher certification. So we have to deal with the policy issue, we have to deal with getting the
courses, winning the school district over, and getting the kids.
We created this course Exploring Computer Science with computational thinking at its core.
We wanted to introduce kids to the breadth of computer science; it's hands-on inquiry-based;
they start off with Human Computer Interaction, Problem Solving, these are all six-week units,
Web Design, Introduction to Programming through Scratch, Computing and Data Analysis, and
Robotics. And I was just telling someone that these modules, they’re six week modules, and
we're getting people now to write them on Cyber Security and we just got a grant with Yasmin
Kafai at University of Pennsylvania to do an E-Textile unit which our dream is that we’d have a
teacher who's doing it at her fashion club and we want to have a whole fashion project runway
show based on one of these units that happened here. So they’re six-week units, they’re
hands-on, they’re inquiry, and the assignments are based on stuff that is really relevant to
these kids’ lives in their community. So it’s called Culturally Relevant Pedagogy where
examples and assignments are sort of to solve problems that are important for their community
and to show how computer science can be relevant.
We also emphasize computational practices which are now sort of the new computer science
principles course that's being designed by the College Board and the NSF, very much
emphasizes these practices and collaboration and analyzing and being able to communicate are
all part of the pedagogy. The pedagogy of the course is really critical so that it’s not just a direct
instruction where you follow this code the way old computer science used to be taught very
narrowly focused on a programming language; this is much more inquiry-based, problem
oriented, and it’s an introductory course. It is the first taste that kids have at what computer
science is, and then we are designing a pathway of courses so that they would have Exploring
Computer Science, then like a robotics class or exploring textiles, mobile apps, and then an AP
computer science class.
Now I want to show you a video that unfortunately I haven't really shown this because I feel it
has too much focus on myself but it really does focus on the class, the spirit of the class, and it
shows you a lot of kids are talking about it. And when it comes on it comes on really loud just
so you know. I mean it's scary. Okay. You can turn it up. That's usually really loud.
[demo]
>>: So how do you stop your robot from going in circles? It's not exactly your typical high
school problem.
>>: So we’re supposed to like make it turn in a square?
>>: Programming robots is just one of the challenges that the students take on in this Exploring
Computer Science or ECS class in Los Angeles.
>> Jane Margolis: There were great disparities in opportunities in computer science that fell
along race and socioeconomic lines.
>>: With support from the National Science Foundation, education researcher Jane Margolis
investigated why so few girls and underrepresented minorities are learning computer science.
She and her team at UCLA developed ECS to reverse that trend.
>>Jane Margolis: It's for getting kids to understand the problem-solving that is at the heart of
computer science.
>>: What do we have to do in order to make it correct? What do we have to try?
>>: ECS is tailored to spark the interest of all kids but especially a diverse mix of kids living in
low income areas.
>>: My family, we were really poorer when we came here. This class has helped a lot because
it's not only is it computers but it's also career-focused.
>>: The curriculum encourages hands-on learning.
>>: The kids are let loose to explore and are really encouraged to collaborate with each other,
to brainstorm together, to work together, to solve the problem and to be creative.
>>: Like squaring away that robot.
>>: I think it’s complicated because you know you have to get the codes right so if you miss one
little thing you know it's all wrong so you have to be very careful.
>>: Students learn how to think about problems to create and use technology to express
themselves.
>>: This is my robot named Bombay. I'm just programming it to do music since I'm a musician
myself. This class is amazing. I can never stop learning.
>>: Teacher development is a critical part of making ECS a success in the classroom.
>>: Here is the challenge right now because if all you're doing is following directions your job is
going to be automated; it's going to be a low skill job that’s probably going to go away so we
need to learn how to be thinkers, we need to learn how to be problem solvers, we need to
learn how to ask questions because that's where the jobs will be.
>>: ECS is having a real impact. Joshua Ortiz took the course and is now working full-time for
the web-based company Edlio.
>>: It's great. I mean it's pretty much been the best opportunity I've ever had. I mean, I
wouldn't be anywhere even close here where I am today if it wasn't for that program.
>>: ECS is now being taught in schools across the US. Thanks to Margolis's research this
curriculum is introducing more kids to the creative possibilities in computer science. For
Science Nation, I'm Miles O'Brien.
[end demo]
>> Jane Margolis: Okay. So that sort of gives you a sense of kids’ engagement and what we're
trying to do. So teachers and pedagogy are really key that to have this curriculum you just can't
put a curriculum into the schools but you have to sort of rework with teachers because there is
no computer science teacher so they’re usually math or science teachers or business and so
they have to learn content but also pedagogy and they have to make the transition from being
sort of direct instructions the way they've been taught to more inquiry-based instruction which
is very challenging for many of the teachers; so we meet with them in the summer, we meet
with them throughout the year, and we have coaches that visit the classrooms. And we are
pretty proud of in Los Angeles what our results have been. The district is 72 percent Latino and
we have 75 percent of the students are Latino and 45 percent of the students are girls. That is
pretty unheard of in terms of high school enrollment in computer science.
This figure shows you that the blue bar is the numbers of enrollments in AP computer science
from 2007 and 2008 when we started to 2012, and the red bar is the rise of the enrollment in
our course. And the whole key is to assure that there is another pathway of students to follow
after they take this introductory course so that they continue getting this education and
experience. The student impact is that we do student surveys pre and post every year. Their
interest in computer science has increased significantly, their attitudes and beliefs about
growth theory, in other words, do you believe that this is an innate talent or do you believe that
with experience you can do it have also grown significantly. The perceived learning about all
the different topics and their persistence has also grown. And the interesting thing is the
gender differences have decreased so that in the beginning of the course when we asked
students about their confidence in taking this course about what they know, what they don't
know, and then we do it at the end of the course the gender differences have decreased
dramatically.
So our course is spread nationwide. It started in LA but it is now, the Chicago public schools
have adopted it as required in the public schools. The spread of it is because the NSF and
Code.org and I know Microsoft has been a partner of Code.org. And we are trying to create
partnerships in all the major school districts. We also have them in places like Utah. It's
starting here in Seattle, a small course and also in Spokane. You can see that the South is really
a place where it is not at this point. And that's my new mission is to get us into the South, and
we had the first bite from Alabama and Mississippi so hopefully when I show you this map a
year from now it will be filled up even more so this is pretty exciting. It also presents a lot of
challenges for us because when you scale up a program I don't believe that the numbers are
what you should be judging by, I believe it's like the depth of the learning, and so one of the
things that we are really wrestling with is how we can capture that in a very quantitative way.
Let me just back up here to that about the depth of learning. We have partnered with SRI,
Stanford Research International, to come up with assessment measures that can look at and
find out about student’s learning. We don't want it to be a standardized test; we want to be
able to show the creativity, the problem-solving, the innovative sort of a way of working that
the students are doing. So it's both content and they’re wrestling with the problem-solving.
And so SRI has taken this on about how to come up with really authentic measures for
computational thinking and it has been a back breaker. This is SRI. This is what they do. You’d
think they could come up with this. It's been years, it's been three years now, and they're
probably listening. They're doing a great job. They are. They are doing a great job, and we are
partnering with them, but it is just really difficult.
>>: Have you thought about also measuring where these students go afterwards? Following
what they do even through college?
>> Jane Margolis: Right. Once we have a pathway we can do that more; and the other thing is
that gets pretty difficult because there is so much ID security about following kids in public
schools and that's why a lot of people just do this work in private schools where it's easy. We
are really going to the hardest place to do research and the hardest place to bring these
opportunities to kids, but we're not letting it stop us.
So Rane had said end with a call of action. So this is my call of action: so my saying is it's not
about diversity numbers to get Jesse Jackson off the backs of Silicon Valley. In other words
that’s not why we're doing this work. It's not about just getting low hanging fruit; in other
words, all the kids that have had all the scaffolding in the private schools to boost the numbers.
It's not about creaming off the top, it's not about just getting more CS workers on our side;
we're about equal educational opportunity for all students, for all citizens in our country and
worldwide. It's about equalizing opportunity distribution of knowledge. And it is not just about
education that has to change.
So there's a lot of attention back and forth where industry says well, we can't do it because the
pipeline isn't providing enough students of color or women and education says, well, we are
nervous about sending them to you if it's going to be a bad experience. So it's not just one; it
has to be both together and it's really about systematic change. I mean this issue says that
there's really something wrong in our system of education and inequality and so my sort of
inquiry based question is what can Microsoft do about that and how to best support initiatives
that are tackling systemic inequalities. Does Microsoft feel that that’s in their charter? In what
they should be doing with the big footprint that tech companies have, the big megaphone that
tech companies have? What should be the range and depth of these kinds of issues that are
being tackled? And should it just be left to nonprofits or educational researchers and activists
to be doing this, but how can there be a real partnership and is that even a reasonable request?
So our message is that we believe in building our message is that we believe in building talent
not just identifying talent; and we feels a lot of what has been happening lately to address
these diversity issues is by just identifying the talent that is currently there and what we want
to do is to build more new talent and give many more people these scaffolding opportunities.
And so thank you, and that’s the website, if you have any questions I’m Margolis at UCLA. Do
we take questions now are after?
>>: Yes. We can take 10 minutes of questions and then we’ll do some more at the end.
>> Jane Margolis: Does someone want to call or should I call?
>>: So I'm curious to hear about your though on introducing computer science earlier to
children like elementary school students. You mentioned Code.org. So I've been volunteering
at my daughter's school and Code.org has been wonderful, they have curriculum for these
lower elementary children; and then the thing is my experience so far is that these younger
children they already have this baggage. Computer science is for geeks, anything like that. Girls
and boys they're equally excited and they are just so eager to learn. So I feel that maybe one
sort of approach to tackle this inequality is just introducing them early before they build up
these a little more differences between them.
>> Jane Margolis: Absolutely. So we’re do the high school now, but it's really clear that it has
to be middle school because that's where the huge gender divide occurs often and that's where
kids sort of make up their minds if they are a science person or a math person so middle school
is really important so that's sort of what has to be done also. And then in terms of elementary
school I agree with you. The one chapter I think that's outdated in Unlocking the Clubhouse
because it was written in 1999, was that I talk about walking into my daughter's K through five
classes and how the boys are hogging the computers and that they are hogging the Lego tray
and the girls are the art table; and now I mean that there's been such a dramatic shift since
1995. And so I think that the girls, the young girls, Code.org and all that stuff are just gobbling it
up. So I agree that it has to be younger also and that's important. There, and then in the back.
Yeah.
>>: I remember Bob Moses speaking here a few years ago about the Algebra Project. Can you
talk about math education in Los Angeles and how kind of this parallels it and how this differs
from it?
>> Jane Margolis: Well, you bring up Bob Moses. He spoke here? Wow. So he's one of our
mentor people. We base a lot of what we do on the Algebra Project. Math education.
>>: You mentioned lots of girls are probably taking algebra and pre-calculus but>> Jane Margolis: Yeah. Girls are actually doing better. I mean the big issue, actually students
are at the top often in math. It's African-American boys; the whole racial thing affects who
does well in the math and sciences and who does well in high school. So with the new common
core and everything math is going through a whole new reorganization. I can't really comment
on it but that, Maria.
>> Maria Klawe: I can answer that. So we have a program called Math for American LA and we
have about 80 teachers involved in it. And the bottom line is that if you look across the LAUSD
school district about 3 percent of the students are scoring at advanced on average in the
schools and something like maybe 15 percent are scoring at proficient and so that means that
more than 80 percent are not scoring at an appropriate level. It is awful; and most people who
are not low income are sending their kids to private schools because the LAUSD schools are so
problematic. So I would just say, I mean it’s something Math for America in LA is definitely
working on but it's hard.
>> Jane Margolis: Math is one of the top priorities for LAUSD because a lot of kids drop out on
algebra 2. They can't complete algebra 2. So everything that we do when we were trying to
create the partnership was: is what you're going to do affect algebra 2? So actually we had a
spinoff project called Mobilize in which kids are using cell phones to collect data and it's really a
data science course; Deborah Estrin, if you know her she was a partner with us and the people
in statistics, and they collect all this data and then they learned how to analyze data and
represent it and then LAUSD just said that kids can take that course and the University of
California gave it college preparatory status instead of algebra 2. The content is way higher
than that what they were doing in algebra 2. It's really an exciting course. Also we’re now
working on a STEM Plus C Grant which is to bring computer science into STEM and have had to
be more engaging for the kids. But math is just a mess.
>>: So this is really inspiring. Back when I was in Texas we had a program called First Bites at UT
Austin which tried to bring girls from underrepresented high schools and get them interested in
computing and do a summer camp at University and come back year after year; and one
problem we saw was that a number of them we actually got to the University became CS
majors because Texas admits the top 10 percent from every high school automatically. So just
in the University [indiscernible] and it was like throwing them into a shark tank. They just get
brought into a program surrounded by people with preparatory privilege. It was almost worse
than if we had done nothing at all because they just got in there, they didn't have the math
preparation from their high schools wasn't as good, and unless somebody sort of found them
and mentored them while they were flailing they would drop out in the first year.
>> Jane Margolis: Absolutely.
>>: I'm sure you've seen this, but we had first-hand experience with it and it was really, really
tough. So if we were going to do anything here it would be great to get kids for a long program
between high school and college and have maybe gone through your program and just really
stuff them with as much stuff as possible before they go off to [indiscernible].
>> Jane Margolis: Right. And that is, no one should be tossed into the shark tank ever. And
that is one of the things that we are wrestling with, needing for a pathway so it's not just one
course and then kids think oh, I can do computer science and apply to college, but a real solid
foundation; but also, I don't know if you know about the Posse Foundation, it's an amazing
organization that they found that the research if you send one or two students of color that
maybe have not gone to the best of schools that they will drop out and leave. And so they now
are recruiting kids in posses so that they go from a school district and they will go to this college
as a group and they meet with each other, they give each other support, they have mentors,
advisors, and really need that. But you have raised a really serious question. Yeah.
>>: It's somewhat related there. One of the points of failure that you mentioned earlier on is
this is sense of not belonging. And it's somewhat related to discussion that we just had. I was
wondering have you done more research into that and building all the work you've done, have
you done more research into that phenomenon of this sense of not belonging? I’m not sure if it
crosses all the diversity but it absolutely hits the general diversity that we are experiencing in
our workplaces.
>> Jane Margolis: It's a big question. I think the sense of not belonging is kind of the key thing,
issues of identity. How you have thought of yourself, where you feel you can fit, do you have a
mentor, do you have a role model, do you have a posse, is there a women's organization, an
African-American, Latino, computer science organization? How do you feel surrounded or do
you feel alone? I mean so a sense of belonging is really key.
At Carnegie Mellon one girl said I just don't have the background that all these people have or
they feel like I don't dream in code, everyone else here dreams encode, and it’s sort of what are
the norms and standards that are set from the top about what you're supposed to be like to be
in computer science and how do all those unconscious biases, oh you didn't go to MIT? You
didn't go to Harvard? You mean you went to Spelman College? Oh. Talk about Spelman
College? HBCU? Like you're automatically suspect. So I think that a sense of belonging is all
about norms and expectations that are set within the culture and you need a posse and you
need a lot of support to weather it.
>>: Jane, you have a question online and then we'll transition to Maria. It's from Jeremy and he
says, I appreciate that you include race in your talk. I've found that the conversations around
diversity in computing usually separate gender and race. How can we bring and maintain focus
on both? What are your suggestions?
>> Jane Margolis: Well, one of the suggestions is it’s what I vowed to do now. So there's a lot
of attention on gender, and I just gave a big talk that involved a lot about issues about race. So
it's trying to integrate those discussions into a lot of these discussions and gender is now what
everybody is focusing on in the media. You hear a lot about media. And so there's a growing
number of people that are talking about what's called an academia intersectionality so that
what works for white women, white middle-class women, that sense of belonging can be very
different from a student of color. And so it’s just always trying to raise these issues and think
about, as a researcher, is what you're doing applied across race and socioeconomics as well as
gender? Thank you all very much.
>> Maria Klawe: So I'm actually going to talk about almost exclusively about gender, and one of
the reasons that I'm not going to talk so much about race is that it's only in the last couple of
years that at Harvey Mudd we've been successful in actually recruiting classes that have a
significant number of African Americans and Latino, Latina students; and so partly because our
students don't pick their major until the end of their second year we haven't really seen
whether the things that we have done to make computer science very successful for female
students whether or not it's going to actually apply to our African-American and our Latino,
Latina students. So we're optimistic, but I'm going to focus just on women for now.
I have a hypothesis. So Rane sent an e-mail saying this is MSR, people like data, they like
theorems. I like theorems too. Many theorems, however, that involve social change or cultural
change you’re doing well if you can at least come up with evidence to support your hypothesis.
So here's my hypothesis: it's that if we make learning and work environments interesting and
supportive, and we build confidence and community among the women in those environments,
and if we demystify success women will come, thrive, and stay. So that’s the hypothesis.
Let me talk just for a moment about what I mean about demystifying success. So what I really
mean is that we become very explicit about what strategies lead to success at various stages in
your career. So we've been applying this at Harvey Mudd College; and I'm focusing on
computer science because it's not true that everybody needs a computer science degree to end
up being successful in a tech career. I personally do not have a computer science degree. I do
have a couple of math degrees and I've taken a fair amount of graduate work in computer
science, but I don't actually have a computer science degree. And my husband, Nick Pippenger,
also doesn't have a computer science degree. All of his degrees are in electrical engineering. I
know various people with degrees in physics and statistics and other kinds of areas that have
ended up with wonderful tech careers.
But the reason I'm focusing on computer science is whether you get a degree or not I think the
best preparation for going into the tech industry, at least today and for the foreseeable future,
is to have a good amount of computer science knowledge, skills, and experience. So first of all I
get an enormous amount of credit for what has happened at Harvey Mudd. I'm really happy to
get all that credit because I get an enormous amount of blame for everything that goes wrong
at Harvey Mudd too. That's part of being the president. But particularly for what has
happened with students at Harvey Mudd if this is the whole amount of credit to go around I
deserve this amount.
Now probably the most surprising thing that has happened in my career so far was getting
listed on Fortune's list of the 50 greatest leaders of the world and coming in at number 17 right
after Jack Ma and Angelina Jolie was number 21. It’s the first time I've done something my
daughter thought was impressive: beating Angelina Jolie. And I wrote back to her and Sasha’s,
she's 30, she's going to graduate from Harvard Law School. She doesn’t want to be a lawyer.
She wants to do international diplomacy. It looks like she’s going to work for this NGO that
does the background mediation in peace processes and she's probably going to be in Nairobi
next year working in Sudan, Nigeria, Central African Republic and Maule. A mother's dream.
But anyhow, Sasha was impressed by that. But I know why I was on that list. And the reason
why I was on that list is, just as Jane said, there's a lot of attention on gender and technology
right now and they wanted to have somebody on that list and I get to be the poster child for
somebody on that list. So here I am.
We are at roughly 40 percent of our CS majors being female and have it been there for I guess
about five years now, and I'll talk about how we got there and I do want to say that so there's
two places that actually started working on this issue about women and undergraduate CS
majors at the same time. One was Carnegie Mellon and the other one was the University of
British Columbia. And what I will say is very different institutions, large public Canadian, elite,
somewhat what smaller, very different access paths into the majors at the different institutions,
so different very different kinds of things, but very similar approaches in terms of what ended
up being successful. One of the things I want to say is that our faculty a year before I was even
approached about being a candidate for president started doing research on places that had
made progress, and read Unlocking the Clubhouse, and read some of the papers that came out
of UBC and also stuff from Georgia Tech and other kinds of places, people that have been
working on it.
Why did they do that? Because they’re scientists. If you want to solve a problem you read the
literature first so that you don't start from scratch. And they did. But even more impressive is
that 40 percent of our computer science faculty are female. I don't know of another institution
where that is true. And in fact 40 percent of all of our faculty are female. We are a science and
engineering school and they're pretty evenly divided across disciplines. The evidence that I’m
going to start with first of all it's not about Harvey Mudd because I want to say, Harvey Mudd,
so it’s an interesting lab for experimentation. It's tiny. It has a particular focus. And we are
now trying to see whether some of the things that happened at Mudd and also happened at
Carnegie Mellon and Cal Poly [indiscernible] and the University of Washington and the
University of British Columbia and so on we’re trying to see whether we can actually replicate
that at a number of institutions across the country with funding, let me say, from Microsoft and
Google and Facebook and Intel.
But I'm going to start with something else. I’m going to start with the Computing Research
Association's Committee on the status of women, known as a CRA-W, I have been known to it
CRAW. I don't necessarily like being called CRAW, but the Computing Research Association; it's
a very useful association for all kinds of reasons. Virtually every PhD granting department in
the US in computer science and many in computer engineering and in information sciences
belong to CRA; and about 80 percent of the departments, sometimes more, sometimes a little
bit less, participate in a survey every year called the Taulbee Survey and that provides the best
data that I know of in terms of the percent in gender. They also do racial foreign students, all
kinds of things. They collect that data every year and it’s a very useful collection of data to look
at what is happening.
So in 1990 the first female was elected to the Board of the Computing Research Association.
Computing Research Association had a Board for 20 years and no woman had been elected. I
was that woman. The reason that I got elected was that Ed Lazowska, who many of you know
from UDUB, is a very, very good friend of mine, had asked me to run for it the year before in
1989. In the 1988 we had moved from IBM Research to University of British Columbia in
Vancouver, and I ran and I didn't get elected. So when he asked me to run again for the next
year’s election I said sure, I'm not going to get elected. It's not a problem. I don't need to
worry about this. I got elected. And there are many things I'm somewhat proud of, but one
thing I'm really proud of is by the next year we were 30 percent female on that Board. And so
typically, I can't even remember how many people were on the Board like maybe around 20, so
it went from one female to 30 percent. And all it took was just a sort of like raising awareness
and saying let’s nominate a bunch of really credible women to run for this Board.
But also in that first year, Nancy Leveson and I started the Computing Research Association’s
Committee on the status of the women. And there are all kinds of ideas that Nancy had that
were incredibly good ideas. One of them was, I think I was responsible for saying let's have cochairs so that somebody doesn't have to do all the work themselves, but one of her ideas was
let's make every single person who's on the Board have to be responsible for a project. Let's
make it in action committee. I've copied that so many times. It was such a good idea. And
because it was the Computing Research Association and we were talking about women the
focus was on how do we get more women into PhD programs and how do we get more women
into research careers? Because, as you know the situation for industrial research labs is, so I
worked for IBM Research. At that time Bell Labs was also a wonderful research lab. Neither of
them are anything like what they used to be. Microsoft Research is by far the best industry
research lab, industry research community at the moment. I'm really hopeful that it’s going to
stay that way, etc., etc. But the vast majority of research in this country goes on in academia
and so that was where the primary focus was.
So what kinds of programs did CRA-W do? They were largely funded by the National Science
Foundation. Also some funding from Microsoft has been a major funder for some of the
programs, so has Google; I believe there's been some DARPA money and NSA money and other
kinds of things. I'm just mentioning a few of the things they've done. There’s many more. But
their whole idea was, and this is sort of where the idea of demystifying success comes from, is
to first of all let's figure out how we can get more young women who are majoring in computer
science to go do PhD's. And so one of the early projects they did was, and it’s still running
today, is the Distributed Mentor Program. So the idea was: maybe it would be really a good
experience for a female undergraduate student to get to do research with a female faculty
member in one of the summers. Now at the time there were many departments that had 0, 1,
2, or 3 female faculty members and so the opportunity to do that, so let's suppose I want to
work in computer graphics. The likelihood that there is a female computer graphics person in
my department is small. And so the whole idea is that you would recruit female faculty
members from across the country who’d be willing to supervise undergraduates and you do a
matching program.
One of the great things that was done, led by Anne Condon who was in charge of the
Distributed Mentor Program at the time, was they did, with help from some faculty at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, they did a very detailed study that looked at the impact in
terms of a longitudinal study of the likelihood that participants in the DNP Program would go on
to graduate school in computer science versus unequally matched in other kinds of ways. And
they showed there was a very significant increase in the likelihood of going on to graduate
programs.
Another thing that CRA-W did is take say a cohort, and you were one of them, about 250
students, PhD students in a year and basically take them from institutions all across the country
and bring them together I think it once a year so that they would actually have a chance to
bond because you might be the only female PhD student in your research group. In fact at
some institutions, some of the quote unquote more elite institutions, the percentage of
graduate students in PhD programs who was female was quite low and so you could feel very
isolated; but if you get a chance to bond and get a lot of mentoring and exposure to all different
kinds of things you'd be more likely to persist and graduate.
The very early days of CRA-W, and they persist still, there were these workshops that were put
around major research conferences maybe the day before or the day after where essentially it's
a daylong program and you're going to find out how to get an academic job: the interview
process, the application process, getting reference letters, getting your research started,
getting your research grant, getting your teaching started, coping with all of the first time you
get in a academic position there's so many balls to juggle in the air. How are you going to do
that?
And the very first one that was done was for women only, and then it was realized there are a
lot of a young men who need this as well. I remember one of the most memorable ones was I
was watching a panel with three women on it and they were talking about basically how they
organized their life, how they managed to get things done in time. And one person said, I never
start working on something until the appropriate number of hours before the deadline so I
won't spend more than what I want to spend on getting that done. That wouldn’t work for me
because I would be stressed out. Then the next person goes, actually I start working on
something as soon as I possibly can because I'm not going to stress with it and I just make sure
that once I finish it I don't come back to it. And then the third person said, and this was my
favorite, she said well, what I do when I'm feeling totally overwhelmed is I sort my sock drawer
because it's small, it's doable, and it gets rid of the stress; I get it all organized and then I feel it's
much easier to go back and organize everything else in my life. And listening to this I’m going
like wow, those are all really interesting strategies. But it’s what I mean about demystifying
success is really thinking about, and similarly people talked about how they got their teaching
organized, how they got their research organized, all those kinds of things, just very down to
earth straightforward advice.
Similarly, there have been workshops around the tenure process, around promotion to full
professor, and none of this is rocket science. I remember I love that Allan Fisher, when he gives
talks about getting more women into computer science, making life easier and providing
support and information and encouragement. It's not rocket science. Everybody can do it.
Well, actually we could probably all do rocket science because we’re really smart and we
understand computer science; but we can make a difference.
So I put together this table yesterday afternoon. So this is from the Taulbee data, it says that, it
shows you the percentage of Bachelor's degrees that went to women over a certain number of
years, PhD's that went to women, the percentage of new faculty hired that were female, the
percentage of the existing faculty and the assistant professor positions that were female, the
percentage of the associate professors who were female, and the percentage of the full
professors who were female.
So this is a ton of numbers. So I'm going to sort of walk you through, but I put it together
because there's a lot of information hidden in this matrix of numbers. So first of all compare
these two columns and you will see that back in 2002, the reason I did 2002 rather than 2000
was that that was the earliest that you could easily get to that data so I figured that was far
enough back. So it’s close to 20 percent of the Bachelor’s degrees are going to women and the
percentage of PhD's that are going to women are just a little bit lower than that.
Now look what happens from 2008 through 2013. 2013 is the most recent available. The
number has gone way down and it's running between about 11 percent and about 14 percent.
Look at what's happening at the PhD's. It's staying up there. You're starting to see it fall off a
little bits and that's not surprising because it takes between five and seven years to get a PhD
after you've got your Bachelor’s degree assuming that you went right to get your PhD which not
everybody does, and so I think we're starting to see the lower numbers of women in Bachelor’s
degree programs starting to play here. But to me it's absolutely stunning that for the last six
years there's significant higher percentage of PhD’s going to women than Bachelor’s degrees. I
could've shown you Master’s degrees, but the point I'm trying to make here is the CRA-W
programs, and I haven't been on CRA-W for 22 years now so this is all of a lot of other people's
work that I'm pointing at.
Now look at between PhD’s and new faculty hired. Computer science is one of the few
disciplines that is hiring faculty, female faculty at a higher rate than the PhD production.
Physics is also doing that. Chemistry and biology, forget it. There's at least one thing that's
going on here that helps and that's that you don't have to do a postdoc before you get hired as
a computer science faculty member. Not entirely true during the recession years of 2008 and
2009 but it's very impressive. They have been hiring between 21 percent of the new faculty
and 26 percent of the new faculty and you can see that they are hiring typically at a few percent
higher than actual PhD production.
Now there's some things that are playing into that. One of them is I think on average females
are a little bit more attracted to academia and the teaching aspect of academia than males are
because a lot of males who are finishing PhD’s might do a startup, might go to industry, and I
think that’s some of the bias. But there's also a bias that computer science departments are
saying, just as Microsoft and many of the other tech companies are saying, we would like a
more gender balanced computer science department among our faculty because we think it
would be better for everyone.
Assistant professors: so in that year what percentage of your assistant professors were female?
And you can see it's steadily increasing. Now for the most part it's higher than the percentage
they are recruiting them so this means that people are persisting and that the women are
actually persisting slightly more than the men are persisting which is really unusual in a tech
discipline.
It takes you typically, time to get promoted to associate professor averages about six years so
that's why I chose a six-year thing. So we would expect that we would start to see the numbers
in the associate professor starting to get up to where the numbers the assistant professor were
six years earlier. And low and behold we see they’re steadily increasing.
And then typically it takes I'd say between 6 to 8 years to be promoted to be full professor. It
depends on the institution. So we would start to see these numbers start to get to look like
what associate professors were like 6 to 8 years before. And sure enough that's happening. So
my whole point about putting all these figures together is we’ve have a very deliberate effort to
demystify success in the academic pipeline. We've had a very deliberate effort to get young
women to go do PhD's, we've had a very deliberate effort to keep them successful in their
PhD's and get them into careers after that, we've had a very deliberate effort to get them to be
successful as assistant professors and then successful as associate professors. And my point is
the data says it works. And I don't actually know of any other discipline that has had this kind
of systematic programming for the last 25 years and I'm pretty sure that it hasn't been
happening in the tech industry; and I'm completely convinced that any company that just does
the same kinds of things as a CRA-W did they're going to see similar success.
Now we know that if we look at a cohort of males and a cohort of women that start in the tech
industry and we look and see what percentage is there 10 years later the likelihood that women
leave is twice as high, and yet what this data tells you it's not happening in academic careers in
computer science; and I will tell you working in academia is as heavy a load as working in any
part of Microsoft. I mean it's really challenging. For the departments that are reporting this
you have to do research, you have to get grants, you have to have PhD students, you have to do
teaching and do reasonably well at it, and a lot of the women who are represented by these
numbers also are having kids.
So my point is if CRA-W can do it for sure Microsoft can do it and Google and Facebook and
whatever. But I would actually give Microsoft a better shot at it than any of the competitors.
Why? Because I have watched where our students have chosen to go work, and Microsoft is
our top employer for the last five years. And they all get offers from any place they want it and
they're overwhelmingly choosing Microsoft. And Google is sort of annoyed at this so last
summer they had 20 interns from Mudd. Unbelievable. The most Microsoft has ever had is 12.
Now I'm going to talk about computer science at Harvey Mudd. Remember, I take no credit for
this. Actually I take some credit for these two. So let me just say Harvey Mudd: about 800
students, about 90 faculty, founded in 1955, first students arrive in 1957, one of the Claremont
colleges, the Science and Engineering College of Claremont, top competitors, MIT, Caltech and
Stanford in some order for our students; after that it's a mix of Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard,
and Yale, Cornell, maybe Rice. Carnegie Mellon is sometimes on the list and sometimes not.
We count the institutions where for the students that turn us down where they went and we
count until we’ve covered more than 50 percent of the students who turned us down.
It was founded as a coed college. There was a cap on the percentage of students who could be
female, 11 percent; I have no idea why it was 11 percent. That cap was there. But it was there
so that we wouldn’t lower standards just to let women in and the cap lasted until 1971 so that
tells us we never had more than 11 percent, any problems with getting close to 11 percent
before 1971.
So I arrived in 2006. I was contacted in September or maybe August of 2005. This is what it
looks like the year before I came. About 30 percent of our students and faculty are female and
about 10 percent of our CS majors are female. So somebody was here this morning who would
came up and introduced herself as a somebody who graduated in I think it was 2001 from
Harvey Mudd, and she was one of two CS majors that year. I'll just tell you we are averaging
about 30 female CS majors graduating per year now so it's not, it looks like it went from 10 to
40 percent which is what it did, but the other thing that happened at the same time was the
number of majors tripled.
This is the beginning of this year. We're running between 47 and 48 percent of our students
are female. That's typically what arrives in an incoming class. We've gotten up to about 40
percent of our faculty are female, and for the last five years or so we've been at about 40
percent of our computer science majors are female. So let me talk about how it happened.
So a young woman named Christine Alvarado, who did her undergrad at Dartmouth and PhD at
MIT, arrived as an assistant professor. She had had a great experience at Dartmouth, never got
asked about being female and in computer science. It was taking for granted, perfectly good
thing to be female and a CS major, arrived at MIT and had a ton of students and some faculty
even saying you only got in because you are a girl. It annoyed her. It also really shook her. It
really undermined her confidence and so then she arrives at Harvey Mudd and in a given year
we have one, two, or three CS majors who are female per class here and she sort of goes, we’ve
got to be able to do something about this.
So as I said, they went and they read the literature, and so the very first thing they did, one
really big advantage is that every student take a computer science class in their first semester.
It’s not the only course they have to take. In the first three semesters they are all taking a ton
of math, physics, chemistry, they take a computer science course, a biology course, an
engineering course and a ton of humanities, social sciences and the arts. But every student has
to take that course in the first semester, and it was one of the most despised required courses
in the first semester. And so they decided let's figure out how we can make it one of the most
loved courses in the first semester. And I've heard [indiscernible] a number of times talk about
computer science is incredibly interesting. Why isn't every intro computer science class
inspirational, fun? It is an amazing discipline. He’s right.
Christine also had this idea. She’d been to Hopper as a graduate student, probably as an
undergraduate student too, Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. Probably
everybody at Microsoft knows about Hopper now after we got all this great PR. I'm so proud of
them. Sachia[phonetic] for one, having accepted the invitation to do the interview, and two,
having publicly admitted that he made a mistake and all of the things that he is committed to
do at Microsoft as a result of that. I did feel terrible when it actually happened, very guilty. In
any case Hopper was in San Diego that year. Harvey Mudd is like 2 hours drive from San Diego,
and so the very first year we invited all of our incoming, 44 incoming out of about 200 incoming
female students, it was a bad year for women at Harvey Mudd, invited all of them to go to the
Hopper Conference. Twelve took us up on it and for many years we provided every incoming
female student with an offer to go to Hopper in their first year.
Now one year we took 50 out of let's say 84 students. It's completely destroyed our lab
schedules because they were going to be gone for a couple of days and they all have to take a
whole bunch of labs, and so after that in order not to destroy our lab schedules we decided that
we’d offer 25 first-year females the chance to go to Hopper but we'd actually make the promise
that if you want to go to Hopper you will have at least one chance while you're a student at
Harvey Mudd so this year we took like 60, so 25 first-years and 35 everything in between,
sophomores and seniors. And because of the DNP research we got a grant from a private
foundation for 4 years to offer between 8 and 12 females a summer research experience after
the first year.
Now one of the things I'm super happy about, and Microsoft was one of the leaders in doing
this, is that a number of tech companies, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook for example, and I
believe Intel is doing this as well, I've certainly given a talk recommending this at Intel as well as
at all the other companies, starting an early internship program because it's an incredibly good
time to inspire students and at least the students at Harvey Mudd. You could hire them the
summer before they started at Harvey Mudd and you'd still get a great intern. I mean they're
really bright, they're really hard-working, they're really nice, they know how to communicate,
they can work in teams, all of those kinds of things.
And I've written why we did these changes; and so the bottom line is if you want to get
students into anything in this country you've got to make it interesting, they’ve got to think that
it's interesting, they've got to think that they will do well at it, and they've got to feel once
they're actually there that they belong. Now why is that the case? It’s because we tell our
young people do what you love, do what you're good at, and you will be successful. And so if
they think CS is boring, if they think they won't be good at it, and if when they actually show up
they don't feel like they belong why would we be surprised that they don't persist?
I want to focus on what we did to change the intro CS course because I think there's some really
interesting things to learn from it. So the course today covers the same material, it’s just as
rigorous, but it is framed differently. It used to be everybody taunted at it. This is the course
we learned programming in Java. That's very common among intro classes even though the
programming is only a part of what you’re learning and what you're basically learning is a whole
bunch of important concepts in computer science. And now it’s team-based, problem solving
of science problems using computational approaches in Python. And the word I left out is that
should've been team-based creative problem-solving. And we've used this also for engineering.
It's how we frame our engineering program. So we say it's team-based creative problemsolving. Well, why is that such a good approach? Because virtually every young person in this
country wants to be seen as being creative. And for sure if you think you're going to major in
science and engineering you want to solve problems. Very similar to the ideas that Jane talked
about in the Explorer CS stuff.
Now what is one of the worst experiences you can have in an intro class? You're in the intro
class and there's somebody else in that class with you. I think I'm going to pick Scott this time.
Come here, Scott. So Scott is in this class, I'm teaching the class, and he's in the intro class but
he knows way too much. And he's the kind of student, this is the kind of student I was, that
when I ask a question Scott's hand is way up. Pick me, pick me. And when he answers the
question he knows so much more, often more than I know, and also he asks questions as well,
and he knows more than many people in the room including the instructor.
And for the kids in the class it’s terrifying because it's not that they think oh, there's that Scott
who knows way too much, they think everybody knows that much except me so I don't belong
here. And so what we do at Mudd is we have a really nice conversation with the Scotts in our
classes. It's one-on-one, it's in private, and here's how the conversation goes: Scott, I love
having you in my class. You're one of my favorite students ever. I just love how passionate you
are and much you know, and you know things that almost no student that I've ever had in my
class knows. I know you don't realize this, but there's a bunch of students in the class who find
when we are talking they find it really intimidating because of how much you know. So I love
talking to you, but I’d love that if we just did our conversations office hour, one-on-one. Is that
okay with you? Well done, Scott. I usually pick Ed Lazowska if he’s in the room. It's so much
fun with Ed.
So the first thing we do, so we group our classes according, so our colors are gold; these are my
magic shoes, change the world in them, and black and then white. So we group our intro class
into three sections. There's the gold section for people who've never had any computer
science, there’s the black section for people who've had let’s say an AP CS, and then there's
some group of kids who are really the Scott type who we put in their own section because they
know we too much. Like they've taken probably a full year of computer science at a university
before they got to Harvey Mudd. So we put them in 42 which is the combination of the intro
course plus the next course in the sequence which is called 60. And I know you know why we
picked the number 42. And then we call the students in the class who talk too much and
consume way too much of our time macho bad behavior and we get rid of it, as I just
demonstrated.
Here's the really interesting thing, and I actually didn't understand this until a couple months
ago when somebody who was thinking about employing this at UBC said, the kids start out
being really a big difference between the gold and the black section and yet you claim that
when they start the second course in the sequence they’re at the same place and they do
equally well. How do you do that?
I mean it's a really good question because they really are starting quite a ways apart. So the
answer was half of the stuff that's in the course is stuff that they won't have seen in AP CS. It’s
theoretical computer science concepts and functional programming. And so for that stuff we're
going to cover it at the same speed in both sections. For the other half of the stuff like loops or
whatever we’re going to just cover it very quickly in the black section because they've already
seen it, we just want make sure we get them all on the same page, so we’ve got a fair amount
of extra time. Let's say they’ve got about 40 percent of the time in the course to fill with other
stuff. They just make sure they pick interesting stuff that is not useful for the next two courses
in sequence. I mean there's tons of stuff you could cover, right? It might be useful to them by
the time they're a junior or senior, but they stay away from everything in the next two courses,
60 and 70. It's so simple. The students have no idea what's going on. They love the course,
both gold and black, and they get into 60 and they do equally well. So the vast majority of our
female CS majors who do really well they start in gold but so do an awful lot of our other CS
majors.
>>: Do you have a sense of what the final end of four or five year outcomes are for these three
cohorts?
>> Maria Klawe: So 42, a lot of those students think they're going to major in CS and many of
them to. You don't graduate from Mudd, I mean we've had in my time there, nine years, one
student graduate early in three and a half years rather than four years so having the fact that
you skip one course for 42 means it means you’ve got one more elective in your schedule but it
really doesn't seem to make much difference. Between gold and black we really don't see any
difference. They do equally well. The thing that's exciting for me about this, now let me be
very clear, these are very privileged students because almost all had a good high school
education. I mean we do actually have a few students that we take from crappy high schools,
and so we put all kinds of support in place for students who arrive with a little bit less
preparation, and they are surviving. But our goal is thriving, not surviving. Have we figured out
how to compensate for the crummy high school education? K to 12 education in general in this
country? Not really.
But let me just point out that one CS course is not enough to make a major. So they take the
first course. If you're arriving having thought you were bad at CSN and was boring you take one
course and the most you can hope for is you get them into the second course. So your second
course has to be just as good as your first course, and then you get them into the third course
and the thing you really don't want to have is what's known as a gateway course where all of
your students think that you’re not really part of the club til you've made it through that
course.
Do we have any Stanford alums here? So somebody was telling me that it’s 107. A couple of
years ago I was talking to Stanford students and they were telling me it was 109, but you need
to make sure that they're in a pathway where all of the courses are equally engaging and
wonderful. Either summer research or an industry internship is really important for retention. I
mean for many of our students they take the intro course, they either do summer research in
their first summer or they go on one of these early internships and they really like that
experience, and that's a big part of persuading them that they are actually going to major. And
they make their decision typically towards the end of the second year. And our last two classes
are incoming classes at Harvey Mudd are about 20 percent Latino, Latina which is great. A lot
of that is because we live, as Jane showed in her figures, in a very Hispanic part of the world;
and about 5 to 6 percent of the incoming students are African-American, up from preceding
numbers. Before two years ago about one percent to two percent African-American and about
6 to 7 percent Latino, Latina. So we've actually come a long way. And what we're looking to
see is how those students distribute themselves according to major.
Here is my begging. The number of majors tripled, huge demand from students at the other
Claremont colleges, so 60 percent of the students taking the intro course now are not from
Mudd. It's the first time we've had a Mudd course become one of the five most popular
courses at Claremont colleges. Typically Claremont students don't get A’s in Mudd courses, we
have .1 percent of our graduates have graduated with a 4.0, we just don't like giving A's; it’s
bizarre. So you don't get A’s, you have to work really hard, and students are way too smart so
they typically don't take Mudd courses. They are mobbing us in our CS courses. It's not just the
intro course, we have tons, and we have an urgent need for more CS faculty. We were at nine
and engineering, which is always have the largest number of majors, about 80 per year
graduating, is at 19. Well now, engineering is only graduating let's say 65 majors. We're
graduating 80 majors in computer science, and I need to go from and 9 to 19. But I can't just
make a bunch of people retire or I can't pick up a faculty member from chemistry and say hi,
you are now teaching CS. It just doesn't work that way. So we're now at 13 faculty, so we've
actually increased it by 4, 14, if you count me, but I'm not teaching; so I have this thing out
there, I would love Microsoft to be the first tech company who endows a chair at Harvey Mudd.
There’s probably a conflict with my being on the Board, unfortunately. Three million dollars;
you can pay it over several years.
This is our current distribution of CS faculty. One of the things that's really interesting to me is
up until this year the most number of department chairs who were female we'd ever had was
one and this year it's 47. There's a shared governance thing at Mudd with the faculty and they
elect six members of the faculty executive committee. All of them are female. I mean it's just
amazing. So we do a lot of training for our hiring, but I think one of the things that’s become
really wonderful is our ability to talk openly about bias and to look at a resume and say, here's
the unconscious bias I was bringing towards this. I personally can talk about this. And when
one person talks about it, it makes it safe for everyone to talk about it. Questions? Yes.
>>: [inaudible]. First, I want to thank you as one of the CRA-W co-chairs right now with Nancy
[inaudible] for telling everyone what I spent part of my life. I wanted to ask you, you seem to
be drawing some analogies from those programs to stuff we might do at Microsoft and I was
curious about which ones you were thinking of, in particular the workshops, the cohort, or what
kind of leaps out at you as something that we should bring to Microsoft?
>> Maria Klawe: I would definitely do workshops. I mean I would take a look at technical
career paths. What do successful people, what does their career look like? I would just take a
bunch of those, I mean some people like Peter and Jeannette come in as very senior leaders,
but many people, whether it's in research or whether it's in various parts of the business, they
come in as a fresh college grad after a Bachelor’s degree, and then look at what that path is,
and then do panels just like CRA-W thinks about what it takes to get from a level 55 to level 65
to level 66 and from 66 to 67. What does it take to become a manager? What does it take to
become a technical fellow? I mean just demystifying it and not make it just for women. Just
make it open.
>>: It's interesting that you demystify it. It has a lot of mystery here at the company. So
demystifying a mystery is I think part of the challenge that we are experiencing here.
>> Maria Klawe: Right. So this is what HR people are for. Microsoft has some really good HR
people. But I just think in the past there has not been, it has not been a priority for the
company to really think about these issues and now it is. So I think this is a moment when
everyone, including me, can suggest things. And so if I were in charge of HR at Microsoft>>: Do you want to?
>> Maria Klawe: I don't think Sachia[phonetic] would let me be in charge of HR at Microsoft
because I don't know enough about a bunch of stuff you would need to know. But if I were in
charge of HR at Microsoft I would very explicitly start looking at career paths and I would pick
people who’ve had a variety, and I would particularly look for some examples of women or men
who have had unusual career paths as well as the more usual ones. I would want to highlight
some women who perhaps went to 60 percent of time for a few years when their kids were
small or men who went to 80 percent time or 60 percent time for whatever reason. I mean I
would want to make it clear that there are many paths to success at Microsoft.
One of the things that Sachia[phonetic] talked about in his Hopper interview that I loved was he
talked about this female manager he had and that how when he first came to Microsoft he was
just dying for his next promotion, his next step up the level. I completely understand that. I
have that personality myself. I'm very, very ambitious, very driven and all of those kinds of
things. He talked what a wonderful thing was when his manager, who was female said, you
know Sachia[phonetic], focus on your job today. Put your heart and soul into your job today
and you will get promotions but don't always be looking over the horizon. So there's the things
you have to do for people like Sachia[phonetic] and me who are always looking for more
opportunities. I want to run the universe. That is my goal in life. My daughter does too. It’s
awkward having us both in the same family. But you also want the people who are really ready
to move up and yet they lack self-confidence that they are ready. And so you want the whole
spectrum of different kinds of personalities and you want to make it clear what kinds of things
you can do within the context of Microsoft. Microsoft is a wonderful company, I mean it really
is. It has all kinds of interesting kinds of jobs and all kinds of ways to really make a difference in
the world. I would choose Microsoft to be on the Board over anything.
>>: We have a question online from Jeremy again. So he would like a follow-up question with
you, Maria. He is the same one that asked the question online for Jane. He asks, what is your
motivation for only focusing on gender diversity instead of racial diversity, and what are your
future plans to increase racial diversity at Harvey Mudd?
>> Maria Klawe: So great question. I mean I think the easy answer is I'm female and I grew up
wanting to be a boy more than anything else in the world. If I had been born 50 years later I'm
pretty sure I would've been transgender because boys rocked as far as I was concerned. So I
think my entire initial attention to diversity was focused on gender because it was my life. But
another part was I did not grow up in the US. I grew up in Canada and Scotland and racial
diversity is not the same issue outside the United States or at least in Canada and Scotland.
And I'll say that when I worked for IBM Research which was in California I was working really
hard on gender stuff and there were so few African-Americans even in the research community
that it just wasn’t a big issue. It wasn't really until I went to Princeton that I started to think
really seriously about race because suddenly I was in a country where this was a huge deal and
in many ways a much bigger deal than gender though gender is a big deal.
I'm really happy to say that in all the stuff we've done around diversity at Harvey Mudd we have
placed at least as much emphasis on race as we have on gender, it just was a way harder
problem to solve particularly for African-Americans. The reason it was so difficult to solve is if
you talk to Hispanic families they want their kids to stay close to home when they go to college
so it was always easier for us to get Hispanic students than it was to get African-Americans
because if you talk to African-American families they want their kid to go to the best place they
got into; and if you're competing with Stanford, MIT, and Caltech for African-Americans, let
alone Princeton, Yale, Harvard, whatever, it's really, really hard to get those students to come.
So it has taken time. I'm very happy to say we've made real progress on African-American
faculty as well. So we're not nearly where I'd like to be. We are about 4 out of just under 90,
but I will tell you that's pretty darn good for a science and engineering school and it will get
higher because we've been working really hard on it.
So to our friend from Germany it's not that it's something we are not working hard on, it’s that I
take gender as a way easier problem; and I want to solve both problems, but I'm not going to
wait on gender just because we don't have enough experience with race yet. Yes.
>>: I’m going to ask something that's a bit controversial. One tool that I've often seen used in
addressing the serious inequities is a segregated tool of separating out women or racial
minorities and giving special treatment, women's only groups like the Grace Hopper thing, what
CRA does and having the best female undergraduate and best male undergraduate.
>> Maria Klawe: I did that. It was very controversial with some people on the Board.
>>: I think it’s sometimes counterproductive, particularly the CRA case I think can be, because
what I've seen happen sometimes is the best female undergraduate is not viewed by some as
having accomplished as much as the best male undergraduate and the CRA has made it possible
for a woman to ever be labeled as the best undergraduate.
>> Maria Klawe: This was a long discussion that happened the first year I was on the Board and
the reason I did it was I knew perfectly well that if we didn’t do it we would have 20 male
winners for every female one or even worse. I cannot tell you how many times I have been on
some board or committee and we are looking at the names of people to receive some award
and there are no women on the list. What I knew is if we made separate ones we would have a
female winner every single year and a number of honorable mentions. Yes, there are people
who might devalue it, but there are way more people who would be really impressed when
they see that she won the undergraduate award. And I'll say when I went on the Turing Award
Committee, which I was on for five years, we had had no female winners of the Turing Award;
and I remember telling the then Chair that we were going to have two women win the Turing
Award in my five years. He sort of went, that's totally inappropriate. We're only doing this for
merit. I said yeah, and they're going to win it on merit. And we did. We had Fran Allen and
Barbara Weiskopf. Somebody has got to be there raising these issues.
So the bit about segregation versus not segregation, you’ve got to do both. I mean you
certainly have got to have lots of, so I'm thrilled at how many men we have here for these two
talks today because I truly think we will not solve the problem in any institution unless the men
in the institution take diversity broadly conceived and unless the white people in the institution
and the Asian people in the institution take responsibility for diversity as much as the people of
color and the women. So I feel that very strongly. On the other hand, there are certain kinds of
conversations that will be different. So one of the things about Hopper is Hopper welcomes
men, but the fact that it's let's say 80 percent or 85 percent female makes it a completely
different experience for the attendees, both male and female. So I think you need a whole
range of kinds of experiences.
>>: So clearly the situation at Hopper was unexpected. Can you share with us some of the
positive outcomes as it relates to Microsoft or work interactions with the Board as a result of
that event or that situation with Sachia[phonetic]?
>> Maria Klawe: Obviously we didn't expect what happened at Hopper. I definitely didn't
expect it. Now I bear some guilt. Here's why I'm guilty: those of you who know me day in, day
out you know that I'm sort of a goof off. I like to have fun, I like to be a little outrageous, and
what I didn't realize was I don't behave that way at the Microsoft board meetings. I've tried to
behave that way at the Microsoft Board meetings and I got my wrist slapped and I learned. So
I'm a pretty quiet, reflective, well-behaved at Microsoft board meetings. So one of the things I
didn't understand was that Sachia[phonetic] had never seen the goofy Maria, and one of the
reasons I know this is because he met with Jennifer Chase who’s one of my best friends right
after the interview, and the first thing he said to her was, what was that? I've never seen Maria
be like that. And Jennifer said, oh, she's like that all the time. I am, but he hadn't seen it. So
that's one thing I just want to make clear that I was trying very hard to make the real
Sachia[phonetic] come out because I think he's an amazingly wonderful leader. And I think
some of the things I was doing distracted him and so when he gave you the answer he gave it
was not the answer I was expecting or I don't think it was also the answer he was expecting to
give.
So what good things came out of it? Number one, we have a leader who is the CEO of one of
the most successful companies in the world that admitted publicly he made a mistake. That is a
so huge. It's really rare. That's number one. Number two, he made a commitment that this
would be a learning experience for him. I made a mistake on a panel that Jane and I were on at
Harvard last week, two weeks ago, and I felt completely comfortable saying, I made a mistake.
That was something stupid. The stupid thing I said just so you can know about mistake is I said
if we fix the environment so it works for women maybe it will also make it work for people of
other races. And it is to a certain extent what we've been trying to do at Mudd though not the
only thing we are doing at Mudd in terms of other kinds of races. And a couple of other people,
Jane and Kimberly Bryant, immediately corrected me and said no, that's wrong. And I just went
immediately, you're right. I was totally wrong. Literally Sachia[phonetic] empowered me to do
that because he gave us all a role model that no matter how smart you are or how much you
know you will make mistakes and you can knowledge them and learn from them. So that's a
big one.
I truly believe it has created an openness to talk about diversity at Microsoft that wasn't here
before and to challenge business practices and expectations that wasn't here before. There are
no silver bullets for culture. It's hard work and it takes all of us working on it. But the other
thing that's even more important than what's happening at Microsoft is it raised awareness in
the tech industry about pay equity issues in a way that had been raised before.
Now Microsoft, as I'm sure you all know, it monitors pay by level both by gender and race every
year. It's not a coincidence, my belief is, that women and men get paid by level essentially the
same amount at Microsoft. Their numbers are for race are pretty darn good too because the
fact that anything that you measure actually gets done. So what we don't know is how fast
men and women progress through levels. And I'm sure somebody knows it, but I don't know it.
I have asked>>: [inaudible]. And I think it’s exactly the same point. If we measure it we can actually see.
>> Maria Klawe: Yeah. If you measure it we'll see it. The things I feel is we have a long way to
go, but my goodness we have the momentum, we have energy, we have leadership, nothing
can organization where people are really motivated to make changes. Last question.
>>: Have you seen any positive [indiscernible] from all of the successes on gender at Harvey
Mudd where the boy genius narrative has been broken down or some other aspect in which
perhaps you actually have made [indiscernible] into other diversities for challenges that have
started to kind of change the culture of computer science anywhere?
>> Maria Klawe: Yeah. So the short answer is yes. I mean just the numbers for women in the
leadership roles, that's unbelievable. I mean it's just amazing. Nobody was working on it. So
the top student this year is Pria Dante[phonetic] and the second student in terms of GPA is
Steven Ibenez[phonetic] who was one of the students who came from a crappy school who we
thought was going to do so well and he has a GPA of 3.9 and maybe Pria[phonetic] is 3.92 or
something like that.
So we are seeing changes. And a lot of it is when you have a lot of people, so for instance we
have these two amazing African-American, actually one is African Canadian to be honest, but
Mo and Talithia in the math department and they're both spectaculars teachers and
spectacular leaders had everybody loves them. Well, how cool is that in the sense that every
single one of our students is seeing role models that don't look like your traditional
mathematician? Now Talithia is going to be a college president I have no doubt, she just is
going on ACE Fellowship for next year. She's going to be shadowing Freeman Hrabowski who is
the first African-American scientist to lead a Research 1 university. He's been president for 20
years at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. That's her path. I know that's what
she's going to do. It probably means we won’t keep her for all that long at Harvey Mudd
because I'm planning already is what the right path for her is. Mo will probably be a
Department Chair; he might be a dean of the faculty eventually at Mudd. He’s extraordinary.
I think the thing is that when you sort of un-bottle it and when you give everyone a right to
challenge, to ask, to propose you do see huge progress. Mudd, we're not even quite 60 years
old and we are making big changes.