Attracting High School Applications from Females

What we are doing:

• Canadian Computing Competition: This is organized by the CECM, and headed by Troy Vasiga. More on this below.

• Imperial Oil seminar. This is a weeklong seminar here at UW for girls (9th and 10th grade) from across Canada. Various speakers and activities expose them to what CS really is. The girls are picked out to favour the ones that have not had much CS exposure previously. No special effort is made to recruit them into UW specifically; the point is to acquaint them with CS in general.

• Various events to attract high-schoolers into CS:
  • High-schoolers can take CS135 while at high school (new initiative)
  • Ontario University Fair (September)
  • UW Day / Fall open house (November)
  • CS4U (November)
  • Campus Day (March)
  • CS Early Phonathon to early accepted students (March/April)
  • Math Phonathon to all accepted students (May)
  • Math Hot-line to answer questions (May)
  • U@UW day (May)
  • events are usually held on Saturdays, since students are too busy after school to come on a weekday.

• Some non-local initiatives:
  • China recruitment tours (new initiative)
  • Alberta school visits

• The deadline for applications is in February. Students must commit by late May.

• We do go out to high schools to attract students as well, but only have limited possibilities.
  • High schools value the time of their students.
  • They do not want pure advertising to their students.
  • We try to give small research presentations rather than "UW is so great" talks.
  • These initiatives are so far faculty-wide and not specific to CS.

• Golden brochure
  • is handed out at all these events and sent to all accepted students.
  • worked on making it attractive to females
  • remove "CS course recommended", since it is not actually taken into account and may deter students from applying

• Many ways are already set by the time girls reach high school; we might want to aim even earlier (i.e., middle school).
  • mixed responses as to when people make up their mind about career choice

• Summer camps:
  • we do not currently have a camp for CS, financing is an issue
  • the ESQ camp may have some CS component; we should investigate
  • we could apply for a grant to run such a camp
  • aim would be early high school or even mdidle school students
  • focus on "problem solving with computer" rather than "CS"

• CS high school courses:
  • currently listed as "recommended", but not taken into account during admission according to P.v.Beek
  • wide variety of quality
  • very unspecific curriculum
  • work is under way to improve it, Sandy Graham is our liaison on that committee

• CS High-school Teacher training
  • Current there is a week-long seminar on this
  • Imperial Oil money for it is running out
  • There appears to be no initiative to try to replace it (should check with Ian VanderBurgh)

Ideas & Thoughts

• Imperial Oil seminar. The money from Imperial Oil for this is running out. Ian VanderBurgh (from CECM) is trying to find more funding; Therese still needs to talk to him about what all they are trying. We should throw our weight behind this - the seminar seems a worthy activity and is well-established already.

• Media-exposure: Wherever possible, we should try to get positive media exposure about CS and females. Sandy Graham mentioned that some of the girls invited to the Imperial Oil seminar are later mentioned in their local newspapers. We should build on that, and maybe proactively contact those newspapers. We should work on coverage by the Record as well.

• Feedback from Imperial Oil seminar: Apparently no long-term studies have been done about whether these seminars are effective. They would be hard to do (how does one separate the effect of the seminar), but would be worth having.

• Canadian Computing Competition: Female participation is rather low. No females made it to the second stage this year, and looking at the past few years reveals that this is quite a common phenomena.

  There are several ways to address this. One is to think of different activities, not competition oriented, to engage high school kids in CS related issues. In the CS4U days that Shai organized in previous years, we have had a reasonable percentage of high school female participants.

  Independently of that, we may wish to talk to Troy about the possibility of employing "affirmative action" in the selection of students that are invited to that second stage.

• We have lots of high school girls available as focus groups. Naomi's daughter, Shai's daughter, Grant's daughter, probably a few more, and they could bring their friends. We agreed that we wouldn't want to talk to more than 5-10 girls.

  The problem is what to ask them. "Why don't you choose CS" is what we really want to know, but we need more guidance than that so that if they answer "it's not cool", we know how to follow up. This will require a lot of prior though on our side, to make sure we make the most of such opportunity.

• One idea would be to meet with high school teachers instead. There are some really good math teachers out there, which might have better insights than the girls themselves. It would also be easier to meet with the teachers. The teachers would have less hesitation to talk to us, and we could simply meet for dinner and talk. As opposed to the girls, where we'd probably have to do some sort of activity to make them comfortable speaking to us and to make it worthwhile for them.

• We could try to piggy-bank onto some event for high school kids, but unfortunately no such event seems to be scheduled for the near future. CS4U is not until November.

• We need to find more literature. In particular, more papers like the ones from CMU: what makes CS unattractive to highschool girls? In other countries, this seems to be much less of an issue (e.g. in Israel or Greece), according to Shai and Georgia. Are there any comparative studies among countries? What makes the climate so different in the US and Canada? Are even US and Canada comparable?

Annotated bibliography

• (May 22, 2007) Paper by Eidelman and Hazzan about Israeli vs. Arab female CS participation. The Arab's participation rate is noticably higher. This is a formal study with statistical analysis. The reason mostly seems to be in cultural difference for the Arab minority: They place more value on education in general, and more utility on CS than Israelis. This study is more for differences between Israeli and Arabs, and less about gender reasons

• (March 31, 2007) Tamer Ozsu's data about CS attendance here at UW:2006-SCS-Data.pdf There were 184/1403 female applicants to CS in 2006. 103/790 females received offers and 36/344 accepted.
• (March 25, 2007) Celine Latulipe and Sandy Graham paper concerning the CS Girls Rock camp.
  Gives details both of the organizatorial details around the camp, about the things that were done, and about surveys they have done with the girls both before and after. The survey-results in particular should be interesting to us.