Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon

Professor Jo Atlee is an internationally renowned researcher in software engineering, who is a pioneer in automated analysis of software requirements. Recently, Virtualware featured her in a video of remarkable women researchers, alongside Marie Curie and Margaret Hamilton. She co-penned one of the classic software engineering textbooks, Software Engineering: Theory and Practice.

But over the years, she noticed there was something that held her and other women back: how they were socialized to be risk-averse.   

“Stereotypically, when it comes to proposing a big project, men will shoot for the moon and women will propose something they know is doable. Women will outline all the steps needed to achieve their goals. But at the end of the day, the people who evaluate these proposals prefer the moonshots. I definitely recognize myself in the camp of someone who would propose an achievable project.”

In addition to being an internationally renowned researcher in software engineering, Professor Jo Atlee is a transformative educator, and a life-long advocate for women in tech.

She notes the irony of this statement since women mathematicians, like Katherine Johnson and Margaret Hamilton, played key roles in the first-ever moon landing. 

It was this “moonshot” mindset that pushed her to transform and lead several equity-based initiatives in the Region of Waterloo. In 2014, as the Chair of the University of Waterloo’s Women in Computer Science (WiCS), she attended the Grace Hooper Conference, the largest tech conference for women. Inspired by this grand celebration of women in computing, she “came back with a mission to create a bigger and well-financed centre.” She grew WiCS from a school-level committee to an administrative entity, supported by staff, volunteers, and donors. Professor Atlee garnered various industry sponsors, helping WiCS organize large-scale networking and community-building initiatives including workshops, conferences, and an orientation for first-year women computer science students. With her leadership, WiCS was able to send more students to national and international conferences for women in tech, giving them a rare opportunity to be surrounded by hundreds of successful technical women and varied role models with whom they can identify.

In 1998, she co-organized the Celebration of Women in Math, while serving as the Chair of UWaterloo’s Women in Math Committee. It was the first nationwide conference for women in computing and math, attracting over 150 women faculty and students across Canada. Professor Atlee recalled that this conference inspired many undergrad attendees to pursue graduate studies because “they saw themselves on stage and were strongly encouraged by other student and faculty attendees to follow their dreams.”

“We created an environment where the women could kind of relax and not feel like they needed to prove themselves. They could just learn from each other and share their experiences, advice, and opportunities.”

In 2018, she launched a local chapter of the Technovation Challenge, which exposes girls ages 8 to 18 to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and entrepreneurship. Participants work in a teams to build an app that addresses some real-world problems.

“When it came to launching Technovation, we definitely had a moonshot mentality in terms of how big we wanted our chapter to be. Waterloo is a technical and entrepreneurial institution, located in a tech-heavy and entrepreneurial-minded city. We knew we could take advantage of our environment to recruit participants and mentors. I was like, ‘We’re going to get hundreds of students,’ and people around said ‘Well, you should be happy with 50.’ I replied, ‘No, we're going get hundreds of students’.”

She hopes that initiatives like these encourage more young women to pursue STEM and help create a community for them on campus.

The lack of women in STEM has been a long-standing issue. Although “human computing” and programming were a women-dominated fields during the early to mid-20^th century, it slowly switched. Many people theorized that this change was due in part to advertising, media and access. When personal computers (PC) were first introduced in the 1970s to 1980s, they were advertised to men. More importantly, PCs were scarce, even in schools and libraries, and boys dominated in gaining access to them. These factors, alongside media depictions of programmers being men, may have deterred women from pursuing computer science.   

“By the time these students reached university, the men had more experience using and experimenting with computers than the women had. The women students felt like they were behind before their computer studies had even started! Thus, even women with the strongest math and technical skills gravitated to other STEM disciplines, where the playing field was more even,” says Professor Atlee.

Professor Atlee was a student during these changes. When she was an undergrad in the 1980s, 35% of her computer science classmates were women. However, when she started teaching at the University of Waterloo in 1992, the representation of women in her classes was as low as 10%.

These days, women enrolment in Waterloo’s computer science programs has risen to 26%, but there are more strides to be made.

“Women in STEM still face various cultural barriers. I think a lot of girls experience discouragements from many sources. They're discouraged by some of their teachers or peers in middle school and high school or the media, about being involved in math or computing. Some are discouraged by their parents, who — in a very loving way — don’t want their daughters to be in that environment.”

For some high school students, they may be the only girl in their computer science class, which causes them to question if they truly belong there.

Professor Atlee believes the best way to mitigate against such self-doubt is for women in computing to find their own personal networks of “technical women” peers and mentors, to whom they can vent, use as a sounding board, learn from, and seek advice. This network provides the mentoring and community that allows women to be more resilient if and when they encounter problems. This is why diversity, equity and inclusive initiatives like WiCS are important: they can empower underrepresented groups to shoot for the moon.

“International Women’s Day is an opportunity to raise awareness about the cultural obstacles that women face. But really, it’s about celebrating what women have accomplished and can accomplish.”