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How Harvey Mudd College increased the ratio of women in CS

56 points| steven | 10 years ago |backchannel.com | reply

76 comments

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[+] gwern|10 years ago|reply
This has been discussed in the past on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvey%20mudd&sort=byPopularit...). The real howto is simple: take a tiny elite college; spend a staggering amount of money poaching the few women interested in CS to your college and loosening admission rates; proceed to talk only about percentages when boasting about your success.
[+] phasmantistes|10 years ago|reply
First, you present this statement as though all the other conversations on HN about Harvey Mudd have come to the same conclusion. This is demonstrably not true.

Second, I'd like to encourage you to not describe recruiting and admitting women as "lossening admission rates". That's the kind underhanded, unconscious sexism that we're trying to avoid here. Even if I accept as true that a higher percentage of men are qualified to be admitted to HMC's CS program (which I don't, but for the sake of argument...) the absolute number of people -- men, women, and otherwise -- who qualify is so much larger than what HMC can support that it could admit a class of 0 men and not have to worry about "lowering its standards".

It sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees. Sure, a larger school might be able to have a larger impact. Sure, maybe Mudd isn't doing as much as it could, or is spending more money than it should. But it is still doing something demonstrably effective, which is more than most places can say.

[+] lukesed|10 years ago|reply
I attended Pomona College, which is in a consortium with Mudd. Our CS departments coordinate with one another and students take classes at both schools.

More than 50% of CS majors in my graduating class were women. And far from having admissions preferences in favor of women, Pomona actually does the opposite. The college's bylaws require an even distribution of men and women, leading to a higher admission rate for men (given that substantially more women apply for admission).

Women in our department definitely benefited from the same kind of efforts as Harvey Mudd: hiring women as faculty, providing summer research opportunities, and sponsoring participation in the broader community of women in CS (eg. through the Grace Hopper conference). I can't speak for my classmates, but I'm sure the things that attracted me to the field - it's fascinating and leads to good career opportunities - also attract women. If you could reduce the sexism I hear is endemic in the CS departments at many other schools I'm sure their graduating classes would also include more women.

[+] mafribe|10 years ago|reply
I teach CS at a well-known university, and am involved with hiring faculty and recruiting students.

There is extreme political pressure to hire females at all levels, from undergraduate students to professor, heads of department, head of school etc. Females at all levels get massively an easier ride in many ways from admission standards to scholarships and research funding.

This is an easy way to meet the quotas for hiring.

[+] jasonwatkinspdx|10 years ago|reply
Someone in my family and several of my close friends did CS at Mudd. Your characterization is entirely inaccurate and manifestly unfair to the women I know that graduated from there.
[+] dbcurtis|10 years ago|reply
Well, I think that loosening admission requirements for women at the elite engineering schools is not actually happening. The elite colleges are, however, soaking up all the qualified women. The fact of the matter is that schools like HMC get many more qualified applicants than they have slots for. So they do their best attempt at matching, and at some point the lottery effect kicks in. I don't think unqualified women get accepted to HMC. I don't think unqualified men get accepted to HMC. I do think a higher percentage of the qualified men get turned away.
[+] gone35|10 years ago|reply
[...] loosening admission rates

Citation fucking needed, pal.

[+] caseysoftware|10 years ago|reply
I serve on the CS advisory board at another college that competes head to head with Harvey Mudd for students. Generally, when one of these schools celebrates having more women or a higher ratio than the others, it means they've managed to recruit more of a static pool rather than growing the pool.

The college that I advise at took another approach to grow the pool while also recruiting better from the pool. They encourage profs to work with Girl Scout troops on science projects, to get students to tutor junior high and high school kids in general, and build relationships long before the normal "I have to think about college" thoughts begin.

[+] phasmantistes|10 years ago|reply
Yep, and Mudd actually does this as well. The example that comes to mind is that a bunch of students work with local FIRST Robotics and LEGO Robotics teams, including teams consisting entirely of women or of minorities.
[+] caseysoftware|10 years ago|reply
I'd also like to add that since I'm referring to a teaching college, there's huge value to having professors work with students of various ability levels and backgrounds. It's a variation of "explain it like I'm 5."

When someone can communicate better, it tends to make an impact on all of their other skills.

[+] jacobush|10 years ago|reply
It's not like recruiting more from a static pool is a bad thing either.

But it's commendable your place is actually trying to grow the pool, I have a feeling you should start 10 years earlier. Help children feel CS is a natural place for women to be, you'll be getting somewhere. This sounds like the correct approach.

[+] up_and_up|10 years ago|reply
> build relationships long before the normal "I have to think about college" thoughts begin

That seems crazy that `colleges` are engaging in such a long sale cycle.

[+] gjkood|10 years ago|reply
What can I do to increase the ratio of women in CS/Engineering?

As the parent of a teenage boy and pre-teen girls here is what I do/can do.

Start/Coach/Mentor a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Team for your teenager. I coach an FTC team.

Start/Coach/Mentor a FIRST Lego League (FLL) Team for your pre-teen kids. I am in the process of forming an FLL team.

Have them recruit their friends/classmates into the team.

It can be a mixed gender team or all girls team.

Training to compete in these events force you into being part of a team, apply STEM principles learned in school into actual practical engineering applications. Build Robots and have fun doing so.

The FLL teams eventually feed into FTC or FRC teams.

I think this will give them very early experiences into what engineering is all about and give them the confidence to take up these streams in later life.

What is important is that at the earlier ages they are not yet peer pressured into gender specific expectations and is exposed to these topics in a positive way.

[+] apta|10 years ago|reply
> What can I do to increase the ratio of women in CS/Engineering?

The question is, why do you want to increase the ratio of women? Is it just for the sake of increasing the ratio? That's not the way to go then.

[+] fhood|10 years ago|reply
I think that splitting intro classes by experience is really important. In intro classes a lot of the more experienced (and thus less socially able) students are actively intimidating. I was helping out with a 100 level project and on the class forum people were "helping" by suggesting the use of regex and bit shifting. Intro students don't have to know about that yet, but seeing it in those settings makes them feel like they are behind everyone else.
[+] seizethecheese|10 years ago|reply
> In intro classes a lot of the more experienced (and thus less socially able) students are actively intimidating.

I think the developer community should try to not perpetuate the stereotype that those with experience programming necessarily don't have social skills. This type of thing is what pigeonholes us as "nerds" who are incapable of being involved in the business side of projects.

[+] serge2k|10 years ago|reply
Why the hell would they be less socially able? Oh I took an intro to programming class in high school, liked it, and learned a bit more on my own. Guess I'm a social idiot now.

Quit perpetuating negative stereotypes.

[+] adiabatty|10 years ago|reply
This sort of thing — grouping incoming students based on prior ability — is fairly common in introductory foreign-language courses. If you don't do this, it's extraordinarily difficult to teach at a pace that isn't generally too fast for the newbies and isn't generally too slow for the people who have done this before.

As someone who's suggested moderately overcomplicated solutions to introductory problems: that doesn't sound like social awkwardness to me. It sounds like people trying to be helpful who don't have any experience thinking about questions like "how can I help this other person solve this problem without introducing twelve entirely new concepts and four calls to an entirely new API?"

[+] alex_g|10 years ago|reply
at my school, most students take as their first CS course, a 123 course focused on a specific topic (app dev, robotics, computer graphics). No prior experience is required and apparently it has really improved on the number of students who drop out of the CS department after starting out with intro courses without seeing any real applications.
[+] holmak|10 years ago|reply
I wonder what fraction of male Computer Science majors also come into their first semester with no programming experience. When I was a freshman, it seemed like absolutely everyone in my CS classes had been programming for years, but surely that's not the case for everyone?

Anyway, the bit about (comparatively) experienced programmers intimidating the other students in freshman classes is a real and terrible thing. I thoroughly support shoving all those students into a different class; it is disruptive to have them in an intro course.

[+] alistairSH|10 years ago|reply
I can't speak about today, but when I started college (1995), it was common for students in the intro CS course to have zero experience coding. Some had built basic web pages, some had used *nix machines, but not many with actual coding.

But, this course was also required for ALL engineers, so there were many separate sections/classes, and probably 80% or greater weren't interested in CS as a degree/career.

[+] ghaff|10 years ago|reply
I took a MOOC offered by one of the elite schools that was based on their intro CS programming class. Although I'm not a programming professional, I've done a fair bit and have at least a degree of familiarity with the language the course used--as well as some basic concepts like sort algorithms, etc.

For me, the course wasn't exactly hard but it certainly wasn't trivial and, had I never written a program (or touched a command line), I'm sure I would have been completely and utterly lost. Sign up for any MOOC in this vein and there are obviously lots of people for whom it's a totally bewildering experience.

By comparison, when I took my first computer class in college, it was a truly introductory FORTRAN course that really didn't assume any prior knowledge. I did have a little BASIC in high school but that wasn't very common at the time.

[+] brianwawok|10 years ago|reply
+1000.

I had the most advanced programming experience my high school offered (Q-Basic baby), but 100 level programming classes were pretty insane. Would have helped to maybe have a few more new to programming type classes with others in the same boat...

[+] mafribe|10 years ago|reply
In my experience as a CS teacher at a university, probably 20% with no experience, and another 30% with a little experience. About 5% are already mature programmers when they come to university.
[+] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
That is why my college did. It worked well putting all the more advanced students on a fast track class.
[+] zeveb|10 years ago|reply
> They redesigned the intro computer science course to focus more on creative problem solving. Instead of traditional homework, the faculty assigned team-based projects so that students coded together. And, most important, they made the courses fun and emphasized ways in which CS can benefit society.

What exactly does the first sentence mean? What is an example of an increased focus on problem solving, and on what was focus decreased?

Are team assignments really just a way for weak performers to glide? I know in my own college career that was my experience.

Is computer science about fun and benefiting society, or is it, y'know, the science of computation? Is it better to build a population of computer scientists who find the science of computation fun and self-evidently beneficial, or one of computer scientists who don't?

[+] phasmantistes|10 years ago|reply
Ugh yeah that sentence made me cringe. It doesn't do the intro courses justice at all. As someone who has both taken and graded those courses, I'll try to clarify.

The intro courses don't consist of homework like "write a function which does X", and they aren't graded like "your function produced the correct output".

Instead, the homework consists of week- to two-week-long projects in which the student produces a moderately complex piece of code. Depending on the point in the semester, this could be anything from a collection of pure mutually-recursive functions, a self-contained class with a nice api boundary, a collection of classes to draw some graphics format, or something else entirely.

The homework is always done in pairs, and you're not allowed to work on it unless your partner is present for pair programming. During official lab timeslots, students are told to trade off "driving" (using the keyboard) every 15 minutes to half hour.

Finally, the assignments are graded both on whether they produce the correct output and the clarity and efficiency of the code.

Student pairs are switched up multiple times throughout the semester, and the graders/tutors ("grutors") spend significant amounts of time working with each pair and making sure that both members understand what's going on.

[+] douche|10 years ago|reply
Yup, group projects and so-called "team-work" are where the bullshit artists go to ride the coat-tails of people who can actually do the work.

On another note, why does everything have to be about benefiting society all the time? When I was an undergrad, I wanted to learn how to write a red-black tree, or how logic gates worked, not choke on force-fed activism. But I hate people, so...

Ultimately, the beauty of coding is that it's just you and the machine. The machine is objective, it has no mercy, it demands that you be correct, and you be exact. You can't bullshit it, you can't hand wave it. Your idealistic O(nLog(n)) algorithm wilts in the face of the harsh reality of constant factors and memory access patterns. The machine doesn't care if you're black, white, or purple, nor whether you have bits that go in or bits that go out.

[+] mafribe|10 years ago|reply

    What exactly does the first sentence mean?
It's a well-known euphemism for: making it easier, diluting standards, making grades easier to manipulate.

Indeed just yesterday, my head of department suggested that I move from programming exercises to essays in my operating systems course, so as to have fewer students fail.

The problem with math/programming is that there are fairly hard and objective and measurable criteria for how good a student performs. So let's get rid of programming ...

[+] jacobolus|10 years ago|reply
Introductory computer science is a tough subject to teach in colleges, because the students coming in have a vast range of different preparation. Even at top engineering schools like Harvey Mudd, some incoming students have never written a line of code, and others have been programming at a semi-professional level for years.

If you present people with highly abstract material that they haven’t seen the like of before, without developing the intrinsic motivation to study it, you can end up weeding out even very smart and capable students.

There’s no harm in taking some of those first-year college students who don’t a priori “find the science of computation self-evidently beneficial”, and showing them its benefits first-hand. Even the ones who go on to concentrate their studies in biochemistry or structural engineering or pure mathematics will surely benefit.

Project-based group work doesn’t have to be easy. Indeed, I suspect the new curriculum at Harvey Mudd is objectively harder than the standard curriculum at most schools.

[+] fiatmoney|10 years ago|reply
Why is shifting people from one major into another on face desirable? We should be glad there are less, eg, female biology majors and future doctors?
[+] daveguy|10 years ago|reply
You should read the article. What they did wasn't about shifting people from different majors on gender. It was about making CS more accessible in general. It probably increased their CS enrollment (and retainment) significantly. Some things they did:

1) separate experienced from inexperienced programmers in intro classes minimizing intimidation effects where it feels like you are behind from the start.

2) early research programs. Get students involved in applications of CS rather than just theory and fundamental programming for 2 years.

3) "share what works" and "demystify success" are communication with other colleges and moocs about what works in teaching cs along with giving more clear guidelines of what successful performance looks like.

So. These have the added benefit of improving the gender gap, but really these are items that will help EVERY CS student. I don't think they corrected for impact of girls who code movements and increased encouragement in HS (eg increase if they had done nothing), but then it isn't a scientific study just a case study.

[+] raldi|10 years ago|reply
If a young woman has equal potential as a future doctor or computer scientist, then sure, it's zero-sum whether she picks one versus the other.

The problem is, there are undoubtedly a large number of young women out there who have the potential to become great programmers and love their careers, but for whatever reason, they're ending up becoming average doctors instead and feeling just so-so about their career choice.

In the latter case, it's better for both the women in question, and society in general, to support their becoming computer scientists.

[+] tbabb|10 years ago|reply
The overwhelming skew in the CS population suggests that women either believe CS is not accessible to them (which isn't-- or should not be-- true), or that the community is unwelcoming to them (which is a problem in of itself and should be corrected, and means that motivated women are turning away from a field that would otherwise excite them).

The skew is indicative of a problem. We should fix it.

[+] cortesoft|10 years ago|reply
Well, this article is written from the perspective of the CS field. The CS field wants more diversity, for many reasons (better pool of candidates, more diverse field, etc). Any field that has a very skewed demographic would probably have similar outreach initiatives to draw in the under-represented group.
[+] aplusbi|10 years ago|reply
What I find most interesting about this is that most of the changes they implemented weren't necessarily targeted towards women and benefited everyone (emphasis on group work, research projects, splitting the into classes by experience).
[+] mafribe|10 years ago|reply

    emphasis on group work,
It's very questionable that this is a positiv change. While it is important (and difficult) to acquire teamwork skills, in practise, most groups gravitate towards one might call "Pareto Groups" where 20% of the participants do 80% of the work. Usually the strong programmers in the group do all the programming, thus getting all the learning experience.
[+] zeveb|10 years ago|reply
> What I find most interesting about this is that most of the changes they implemented weren't necessarily targeted towards women and benefited everyone (emphasis on group work, research projects, splitting the into classes by experience).

I'll take exception to the first example: group work. I loathed and hated group work in college. It was simply and solely a way for people who couldn't hack the course material to manage a pass anyway. This might, of course, be good experience for life, but it's terrible for education.

Research projects could be really, really good if they demand concrete results; they could be really terrible if they are just a way to reward effort without results.

Splitting classes by experience might be a decent idea, although I've heard folks speak positively of one-room schoolhouses as well.

[+] Kenji|10 years ago|reply
I still don't understand why a low ratio of women is considered a problem to be solved. Let people do what they want. Other majors have less men - so what? I loathe this retarded rhetoric. Has our society ran out of real problems?
[+] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
It depends upon why there is a low ratio. For example, if less men are being grade school teachers due to sexist double standards on judgments of teacher/student interactions, then that is an issue that needs to be fixed. The low ratio is a symptom, not the problem itself, but it helps indicate a problem that needs to be fixed.

My issue is that sometimes instead of fixing the underlying problem(s), some people want to apply a patch that ends up not helping (or maybe making things worse).

[+] DrScump|10 years ago|reply
They could have called this program "Mudd's Women", but Paramount might have sued.
[+] benten10|10 years ago|reply

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[+] mafribe|10 years ago|reply
Have you considered the fact that minorities like Indians and Chinese have no problem with being good at math and succeeding in Silicon Valley?
[+] CyberDildonics|10 years ago|reply
Did they also increase the number of men in social work majors?
[+] phasmantistes|10 years ago|reply
The school primarily offers only STEM majors: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, Computer Science, Math, and combinations of the above. It is associated with 4 other neighboring schools (Scripps, Pitzer, Pomona, and Claremont-McKenna), and so some students end up doing off-campus majors in History, Dance, Linguistics, or other fields, but that is comparatively rare (1 or 2 off-campus majors per graduating class, I think).