A Lab of Her Own

With a math-professor father and a mother who is a NASA engineer, Rachel Holladay was primed for a life exploring science and technology. Still, even with excellent grades in science and related subjects, she soon learned that her abilities wouldn’t always speak loudly enough. While taking part in a high-school robotics club, she stood out not just because of her top-tier performance, but because of her gender.

“On our team, I was the only technical leader who was female,” Ms. Holladay says. “I had a mom as a role model, so I knew I’d never give up on being a scientist. But I had to get used to being the only woman in the room, one who was often talked to differently simply because I was female.”

Keeping Women in STEM

How colleges are retaining female undergraduates in engineering and computer science.

• Female-Only ‘Nerd’ Dorm Helps Keep Women in Engineering
• You Don’t Need to Be Superwoman to Succeed in STEM

Ms. Holladay’s experience sharpened her focus on attending a college where female science majors aren’t seen as unusual. Now a senior at Carnegie Mellon University with dual majors in computer science and robotics, Ms. Holladay says she has prospered there, adding that the university’s commitment to teaching men and women the exact same curriculum, and in exactly the same way, has kept her at Carnegie Mellon. “I’ve learned that some people elsewhere believe women or minority members should learn computer science differently than men, which is totally wrong,” she says.

As colleges work to woo and keep higher numbers of budding female technologists, administrators are grappling with a central question: Is it more important to change the courses to make them more “female-friendly,” or to follow Carnegie Mellon’s lead and zero in on eliminating pro-male bias?

Both strategies have succeeded, though mostly in different contexts. Faculty members at many public colleges, responding to research showing that men and women embrace science and technology studies and careers for different reasons, have decided to reach and teach women in new ways. Doing so has helped the colleges attract and keep more such students, they say.

Conversely, the computer-science programs at Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere, mostly at private colleges, say that women need no special training to get up to speed, even if many incoming female freshmen lack the intense experience of tech work that young males may experience both at home and in high school. The college can point to a startling result: Carnegie Mellon has achieved something very close to gender parity in its computer-science program — a rare achievement.

“We’ve simply worked to eliminate any advantages men have in computing by extending those advantages to women and minorities,” says Lenore Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. “This isn’t rocket science.”

Others say the answers aren’t quite that easy. Many colleges, especially public ones, can’t cherry-pick females with talent in the sciences.

“We lack the advantages in admissions that many private schools have,” says Ignatios Vakalis, a professor of computer science at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, where the number of female computing students has tripled in the past decade. “So we have to find different ways to draw more women in and engage them so they stay with us. Research tells us that young women like choice more than 18-year-old men. They like to see how their work will be applied. It was important for us to offer them the choice of learning about computing in some kind of context by changing our curriculum.”

The culture-or-curriculum question is one result of a nationwide emphasis, led by the White House, the tech industry, and several education and science organizations, on increasing the number of females who choose to major in science-based programs. Without more women in the technology fields, the thinking goes, the United States will lack both the numbers of tech workers and the well-rounded, inclusive expertise that leads to innovation, and perhaps the country will lose its competitive edge.

Educators often view the lack of female computing and engineering students as an entrenched fairness problem, one that is abetted by long-held popular assumptions.

“Despite the fact that much of tech work is very collaborative, the existence of people like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates perpetuate this lone-genius idea — and that genius is invariably male,” says Catherine Hill, vice president for research at the American Association of University Women. “You see ads and portrayals of people in these industries. The field is depicted as male.”

Among STEM programs, engineering and computer science in particular face huge challenges in gaining female students. Engineering schools, for instance, have long had a difficult time reaching women, especially those who would major in aeronautical, civil, electrical, or mechanical engineering. Women earn less than 20 percent of engineering and computing undergraduate degrees in the United States.

Engineering and computing draw a much larger number of total students than the other scientific disciplines, making the gender disparity all the more glaring. What’s more, the overwhelming majority of STEM jobs — about 80 percent — are in engineering and computing.

Plainly put, women remain underrepresented in those industries because not enough of them study those subjects. Nationwide, 12 percent of working engineers are women, while 26 percent of computer professionals are female, according to a 2015 report from the American Association of University Women. The report notes that an increase in female achievement in mathematics and science in middle and high school has yet to add up to an increase in the percentage of women working in STEM fields.

Colleges say that while interest from former President Barack Obama and others has highlighted the issue, many programs began trotting out new strategies to narrow the gender chasm 20 or more years ago. Though it has taken time, they have begun to see signs of progress.

Colleges tout some basic strategies, including encouraging their female students and faculty members to give talks at middle and high schools in hopes of getting more girls into the STEM pipeline.

“A lot of them have trepidation, a feeling they can’t do this,” says Ms. Holladay, who volunteers for talks at Pittsburgh-area schools. “It’s important to dispel that.”

Many faculty leaders report success in recruiting high-school girls via campus-based summer camps. Others say that colleges need to craft messages so that young women know they are welcome. At Harvey Mudd College, where 47 percent of science and tech majors are women, administrators make sure that catalogs and web pages feature photographs that include a balance of men and women.

“We had photos of old student bodies in the sciences that were all male,” says Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd. “I threw them out.”

To keep women in their majors, many colleges, both private and public, send them to women-in-computing conferences attended by 10,000 or more female students, saying that doing so makes students feel less isolated. Most colleges also offer some form of peer-to-peer mentorship and tutoring, with more-advanced female students offering first-year students and sophomores advice on professors and courses, as well as help with homework.

Making female students more comfortable is paramount, adds Robert Sloan, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Women make up only 17 percent of the undergraduate student body in the program (an improvement over the 10-percent rate of 2012), but have their own computer lab “so they don’t have all these men surrounding them,” Mr. Sloan says. “It’s a way to improve their experience here.”

Bringing in more female faculty members — most programs hover around the 20-percent mark for female professors — is also important, adds Cristina Amon, dean of applied science and engineering at the University of Toronto, where 41 percent of the freshman engineering class is female. “Women students need those kinds of role models,” she says.

At Toronto, specific hiring practices increased the share of female professors from 9 percent to 21 percent in 10 years. But the effort stalled. Ms. Amon says such diversity programs must remain consistent.

“In the last two years, our search committee de-emphasized hiring women for those jobs,” says Ms. Amon. “We hired only three women for 19 positions.” Alarmed, leaders at Toronto reversed course and added gender diversity back into its hiring criteria. “We’re beginning to see the numbers of women faculty pick back up again,” Ms. Amon says.

The Engineering Gender Gap, by the Numbers

• Women earned 19.9 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering awarded in 2015, the latest year data are available. In 2006, 19.3 percent of the degrees went to female students.
• The disparity between male and female graduates is even greater in the most popular engineering subject, mechanical engineering. More than 25,430 bachelor’s degrees were awarded in that field two years ago, but only 13.2 percent of the recipients were women.
• In the work force, women remain underrepresented in many STEM fields. In 2000, 11 percent of the engineering jobs were held by women. Thirteen years later, the figure was 12 percent.
• Despite the stubborn persistance of the disparity, several colleges have almost reached gender parity:

Colleges With the Largest Portion of Women Among Recipients of Bachelor’s Degrees in Engineering, 2015

Institution	Percentage
Olin College of Engineering	48.8%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	45.7%
Harvey Mudd College	41.6%
Howard U.	41.6%
George Washington U.	41.5%

Note: Includes colleges that awarded at least 50 total bachelor’s degrees in engineering.

But the overriding concern for many administrators and faculty members is culture. While some academic researchers ring the alarm for reaching girls at a very young age — before gender bias has a chance to do its damage — tech educators say that colleges can deal with only the students they get. They’ll do best by working to get more women into their programs and help them succeed, the educators say.

In the 1990s, Carnegie Mellon changed admissions requirements for computer-science students to exclude prior programming experience, enlisted the help of high-school computer-science teachers to encourage more female applicants, and emphasized an applicant’s broader interests over specific scientific accomplishments. The changes helped enroll more females but left some larger issues unresolved.

“When I came here, in 1999, I realized that if we didn’t change the culture, we would lose the women we had,” says Ms. Blum, the computer-science professor. “We wanted to level the playing field on the cultural level.”

Men have long been the majority population in computer-science programs and have had advantages because of it that are critical to academic and professional success, Ms. Blum argues. They have been more likely to benefit from male role models and mentors. Men have been able to take advantage of connections in fraternities and professional groups to obtain internships, and to rely on help from their college collaborators when it comes time to get a job. For decades, women languished by comparison.

The only way to deal with all that, Ms. Blum says, was to create an environment that gave women and members of other minority groups the same support systems as men had.

“We probably had little more than 8 percent women in computer science here in the ’90s,” Ms. Blum says. “Many girls didn’t grow up with a computer, much less pull one apart, because their parents thought it was too dangerous. Meanwhile, the boys had had them since they were 5 and had been ripping parts out of them since they were teens.”

On its way to admitting 48.5 percent females this academic year, the Carnegie Mellon computer-science department began to notice that, despite those differing pre-college experiences, men and women were equally capable of learning the subject and in the same ways — as long as females had the same mentoring, collaboration, and professional-development opportunities as the men did.

“In our more-balanced environment, we’re seeing no differences between the performance of men and women,” Ms. Blum says.

While some researchers have asserted that women are more likely to want to deal with living things and see what value their work in computing could have in the real world (while men are motivated more by programming and making money), Ms. Blum says that is all so much hokum.

“We don’t see those differences here,” she says. “We’re seeing a wider spectra of those things across genders.”

Administrators elsewhere agree that bias needs to be eliminated. They worry about how best to do it, as well as how to get everyone on campus on board.

“We’re having those conversations here now,” says Tricia Berry, director of the Women in Engineering Program at the University of Texas at Austin. “Institutionally, we’re trying to feel out what that kind of change would look like, and how to get there. How do we do trainings? Do we go through student groups? How do we have conversations on how to intervene, and under what circumstances are those conversations necessary? There’s a lot to work out.”

For those who believe the research showing sharp gender differences, culture change is only part of the answer. Reaching young women entails making sure they see how their work can change the world, says Mr. Vakalis, at Cal Poly. To think otherwise is to risk losing them.

“A decade ago, our intro course in computing wasn’t invigorating for women,” he says. “It affected our retention rate.” The computer-science department completely reworked the course, breaking it up into a variety of introductory offerings centered on applications of computing, such as art, cybersecurity, and music composition.

Now nearly 30 percent of the university’s 870 computer-science and software-engineering majors — around 250 — are female, up from 10 percent a decade ago. More than nine in 10 freshman females remain in the programs as sophomores, up from around 65 percent.

One of Mr. Vakalis’s students, Cara Pew, a senior, came to Cal Poly with no programming knowledge at all. An intro course on computational art drew her into the major.

“I grew up in a house with a mother and a sister,” Ms. Pew says. “We had no idea how to fix anything. So I taught myself how to think logically and repair things. After taking that course and learning how to apply math equations to make art, computer science seemed like a cool thing to do.”

Now the president of the campus’s Women Involved in Software and Hardware, or WISH, a group of more than 100 female students who offer support to one another, Ms. Pew works to make underclassmen and potential recruits feel comfortable at the college.

“There’s a lot of emphasis on making everything equal here, but women are about 30 percent of the population, so there is some unconscious bias,” Ms. Pew says. Then, voicing a thought shared by many, she adds: “People still are learning how to do that. We’ve got a ways to go.”