Retaining Female Undergraduate Students

Background and current activities

• current numbers (see data in the attachments table) at UW indicate that female CS students have a higher attrition rate than male CS students at UW.
• relative to other institutions (Canada/NA/worldwide)
• what do numbers tell us: is the situation worse for female vs male students? - can we get this info?

Ideas to discuss

• The questionnaire has been submitted to ORE for approval. (June 28, 2007)
• Provisional clearance for the questionnaire has been obtained, and we are making the necessary changes to the text of the supporting documents. (July 5, 2007)

Recommendations for the report

• ???

Annotated bibliography

• (July 9, 2007) Recruiting and Retaining Women in Undergraduate Computing Majors , by J. McGrath Cahoon (University of Virginia), published in SIGCSE Bulletin, June 2002.
  The author makes several suggestions for both attracting and retaining women in CS. The author makes the point that many of the recommendations would be beneficial for both male and female students, but particularly address issues more likely to affect female students. Though five years old, the same issues still seem to exist. Specific recommendations that we might want to consider include, for example, mentoring, developing "friendship networks" in classes, promoting involvement in research, providing students with opportunities to volunteer their computing talents, dedicated teachers.

• (June 28, 2007) Tian Kou provided data which indicates that the attrition rate for female CS students at UW is higher than it is for male students. The data was provided by IAP on campus.

• (June 26, 2007) Web log by Prabhakar Ragde about women taking cs125 vs. cs133. Various interesting points of views; of course all this is only anecdotal. The study by Christina Boucher and Cory Kasper tried to follow up on this.

• (April 10, 2007) Undergraduate Women in Computer Science: Experience, Motivation and Culture , by Fisher, Margolis and Miller (CMU), published in proceedings of the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium, February, 1997.
  The authors did many interviews with undergraduate students (both male and female) at CMU about gender qaultiy issues. They report here their initial findings, mostly based on comments. Lots of interesting insights are given (summary: males view computers as toys, females want computing for a purpose), but no actual recommendations.

• (March 26, 2007)

  CAUT Almanac of Post-Secondary Education in Canada and a summary of contents relevant to CS.
  Gives data about numbers of female Canadian undergraduate enrollment. Canada-wide, the number is 13.9% female in CS (2004-2005).

• (March 25, 2007) Attrition report from CS at UW. Helpful to paint an overall picture for possible reasons for attrition in CS overall. The survey does not address any gender issues. Some related histograms.