When you think of computer science, what do you see?
If you’re like many people, a series of stock images might flash through your mind: impenetrable code wrapped in strange, curlicue punctuation; The Social Network; video games; pale young men lit by screens.
For the past two decades, Maria M. Klawe, a computer scientist and president of Harvey Mudd College, in Claremont, Calif., has sought to change that imagery. Computer science remains dominated by men, who received 85 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the discipline in 2013. But at Harvey Mudd, thanks to its innovative faculty and Ms. Klawe’s support, that ratio has come undone: This spring, as it has for several years, Harvey Mudd will see almost 40 percent of its computer-science degrees go to women.
Ms. Klawe, 63, is not content with gains at her own institution, however. Late last year, she announced a program, financed by companies including Google and Facebook, to export and adapt the changes made at Harvey Mudd to 15 other universities. Many of them, such as Arizona State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, are public and much bigger than her science-focused college of 800 students.
Getting women into computer science, and into engineering more generally, requires commitment from the top down, Ms. Klawe says. But it starts with a simple reframing. “It’s creative problem-solving,” she says. “It’s hard to find a young woman who doesn’t want to be seen as creative. They also like problem-solving.”
It was a different age when Ms. Klawe entered computer science. In the late 1970s, when she turned her expertise in combinatorial math into a faculty position in computer science, women constituted a significant portion of the field, with female undergraduate enrollment peaking at 37 percent by 1984. But as the personal computer became more a fixture in homes, female enrollment plummeted. Various theories explain this change; some involve early computer games, which featured point-and-shoot play attractive to boys, many of whom went on to create their own games. Soon, Ms. Klawe says, a truism formed: Boys are good at computers, girls are not.
In the late 1980s, she and her husband, Nicholas J. Pippenger, also a computer scientist, joined the University of British Columbia. There, as department chair, and later as dean of science, Ms. Klawe set out to win women back. The department went to where the women were, creating an introductory course that included fine arts and psychology, and promoted double majors with disciplines like biology. She was a frequent mentor and started taking students to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, an annual conference. Over five years, the percentage of female undergraduates in computer science at British Columbia rose to 26 percent, up from 15 percent, she says.
As a mentor, Ms. Klawe often draws on her own life. A lifelong painter, she hid her hobby until her 40th birthday, fearing it could bias male peers against her. There’s a tradition of scientists playing music, but not of working in the visual arts. Early in her career, she was also wracked with self-doubt about whether she had been hired so that employers could retain Mr. Pippenger. (Now, as he’s fond of saying, universities hire him to get Ms. Klawe.) She often felt self-conscious and frustrated when, in a room full of men, no one gave her equal attention. “You’re just carrying a lot of that concern about whether or not someone listens to what you say,” she says.
When Ms. Klawe arrived at Harvey Mudd, in 2006, following a turn as dean of engineering at Princeton University, she found a computer-science department already trying to draw more women to the field. Chastened by single-digit female enrollment and emboldened by the arrival of Christine Alvarado, now an associate teaching professor at the University of California at San Diego, faculty reformers were inspired by Ms. Klawe’s past work, as well as by similar efforts at Carnegie Mellon University. But the push for change was the department’s initiative: “I get so much credit for what happened at Harvey Mudd,” Ms. Klawe says, “and I did such a tiny fraction of it.”
The department’s changes started with its introductory course, according to Ran Libeskind-Hadas, the current chairman. Faculty members divided the class into students with and without coding experience, and instead of making it a nerdy celebration of pure programming, they centered on solving real problems in an accessible language. Students created programs that they wanted to show their friends. The course has been duplicated at Boston and Bucknell Universities; its materials are online and free to use.
But the revamped intro course, now one of the most popular at the Claremont Colleges, of which Harvey Mudd is a part, was not enough. “You have to change the environment,” Ms. Klawe likes to say. The department encouraged double majors, started new clubs, and recruited women in high school.
Boisterous and frequently sporting a Harvey Mudd T-shirt, Ms. Klawe is a natural at the last: When she first arrived, she wrote a personal recruiting note to every woman the college accepted. She also has influential friends: A member of Microsoft’s board, she has raised money to provide an all-expenses-paid trip to the Grace Hopper celebration for any of her interested students.
By championing those steps, Ms. Klawe has put colleges on notice that they can change what had seemed like an unstoppable trend. “They weren’t powerless any longer,” Mr. Libeskind-Hadas says.
At last fall’s Grace Hopper event, though, Ms. Klawe had a reminder that, for all their progress, women still face bias. She hosted Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive. The conversation went great until the end, when, answering a question about pay equality, Mr. Nadella suggested that women trust in the system to give them raises. To cheers, Ms. Klawe disagreed, telling her own story about how she had stumbled in assessing her worth for jobs at Princeton and even at Harvey Mudd. Mr. Nadella soon apologized, and, realizing how he was prone to such a bias, has instituted training on the topic for all Microsoft employees. He’ll return to Grace Hopper this year, Ms. Klawe notes with pride.
Mr. Nadella’s widely reported gaffe had a bright side for the college, too. Afterwards, Ms. Klawe appeared in a lot of television interviews. Each time, she wore her Harvey Mudd T-shirt.
Paul Voosen is a senior reporter covering the sciences. Write him at paul.voosen@chronicle.com; follow him on Twitter @voooos; or see past work at voosen.me.
