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Women's under-representation in computer science

CMU's project (started 1995)

Carnegie Mellon's Women In Computer Sciences succeeded in increasing female participation and retention (from less than 8% to 42% and still rising). This alone shows that changes to how a course is run can transform successful participation by particular groups many times over. I believe that one of their interventions was to change the content of examples to something that might relate to the experience and interests of young women. This issue may be putting off young men too: many of the examples look like the kind of thing familiar to those doing A-level physics 30 years ago (formulaic conversions etc.) -- but not to recent school-leavers.

The project
Short paper on the project
Long paper on the project
The paper most about course /example content:
Margolis, J. and Fisher, A. (1997) "Geek Mythology and Attracting Undergraduate Women to Computer Science" In Impacting Change Through Collaboration, proceedings of the Joint National Conference of the Women in Engineering Program Advocates Network and the National Association of Minority Engineering Program Administrators.
See also:
- Margolis,J. & Fisher,A. (2002) Unlocking the clubhouse: Women in computing (MIT press) ISBN 0262133989 GU lib record=b2734515
  See also www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/gendergap/www/papers/
- Frieze,C. and Quesenberry,J. (2015) Kicking Butt in Computer Science: Women in Computing at Carnegie Mellon University (Dog Ear Publishing) ISBN: 1457539276

Other papers

Cohoon, J.M.G. (2001) "Toward improving female retention in the computer science major" CACM vol.44 no.5 (May) pp.108-114 doi:10.1145/374308.374367 or psu.edu

This paper starts by showing how the percentage of women in CompSci nationally in USA undergraduate programmes fluctuates by year: 12% to 38% to 28% – not likely to be due to innate female characteristics.
It shows that it varies considerably amongst HEI / departments.
And the CMU initiative shows that it can be deliberately changed by a large amount.
Finally, the Cohoon paper shows some of the characteristics of departments associated with gendered differences in compSci departments.

Other Margolis papers

Margolis, J., Estrella, R., Goode, J., Holme, J. J., & Nao, K. (2017). Stuck in the shallow end: Education, race, and computing MIT press. Google books
Margolis, J., Goode, J., & Bernier, D. (2011). "The need for computer science" Educational Leadership, 68(5), 68-72.
Goode, J., & Margolis, J. (2011). Exploring computer science: A case study of school reform. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 11(2), 1-16. doi: 10.1145/1993069.1993076
Goode, J., Chapman, G., & Margolis, J. (2012). Beyond curriculum: the exploring computer science program. ACM Inroads, 3(2), 47-53. doi: 10.1145/2189835.2189851
Margolis, J., & Goode, J. (2016). Ten lessons for computer science for all. ACM Inroads, 7(4), 52-56. doi: 10.1145/2988236
Margolis, J., Goode, J., & Ryoo, J. J. (2015) "Democratizing Computer Science" Educational Leadership, 72(4), 48-53.