Steering More Women to Silicon Valley

Divya Koyyalagunta barely knew what computer science was when she arrived at Duke University her freshman year. She had grown up wanting to be a doctor, and chose Duke for its strong neuroscience program.

One day, while working in a neuroscience lab, she was asked to modify some code used by scientists to analyze data. Though she had never done any coding, she was quickly able to figure out how to update the program. “I felt powerful,” she says. “For the first time, I felt like I could sit down and create something that other people could use.”

Ms. Koyyalagunta was hooked. She signed up for Computer Science 101, then 201, and eventually chose the field as a major. Still, with so little experience, she worried about getting a job after graduation. But last year she learned about the Duke Technology Scholars Project, known as DTech, a career-training program that seeks to increase gender diversity in the technology industry by placing female computer-science and electrical-engineering majors in internships in Silicon Valley and beyond. The program’s director convinced her that her lack of experience didn’t matter. In fact, that was the program’s goal: to provide women with a summer’s worth of work experience so they’d have a shot at a career. Ms. Koyyalagunta applied and landed an internship at Apple.

Preparing Women for Tech Careers

Colleges are building new programs in response to a longstanding problem: a dearth of women working in tech.

• 3 Ways to Get More Women Into Tech
• Higher Education Takes On the Tech Industry’s Diversity Problem

DTech started in 2016 as Duke’s response to a decades-long problem: a dearth of women working in tech. In 2015, women held only a quarter of the nation’s computing jobs, though they made up 57 percent of the work force, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. As recently as 2004, just 10 percent of students who intended to major in computer-science at four-year colleges were women, though the number has since been rising, according to the Higher Education Research Institute. Meanwhile, a recent blitz of stories has highlighted widespread sexual harassment faced by the women who do make it into the field: Within the past year, top executives have resigned after sexual-harassment claims were made public at Uber, Social Finance, and the venture capital fund 500 Startups, while an engineer at Google was fired after circulating a memo questioning the value of gender-diversity initiatives.

But there are people who are working to encourage more women to enter the field. One is an anonymous Duke parent from Northern California who donated $1.5 million to fund the university’s DTech program. So far, Duke has seen some success. Almost all 41 women who have participated in the first two years were offered another internship, and many were offered jobs upon graduation. Next summer Duke expects to expand the program and include a cohort of underrepresented minority students.

The program gives women hands-on experience in a technology company so they see firsthand that such work can be creative and can solve problems, says Monica Jenkins, the program director. These internships might make a job in tech more appealing to women who otherwise might not know what such a career would entail.

“I thought if we could engage women early on in their careers and get them in an experiential situation, we’d get them hooked,” Ms. Jenkins says.

She interviewed 44 students for the 10 spots available in the program’s first summer. During these conversations a common theme emerged: isolation. Students described computer-science classes where they were the only woman, and the feeling that they were way behind male peers who had been coding since middle school.

Originally, the plan was to house the summer interns working in Silicon Valley with Duke alumni who lived in the area. But Ms. Jenkins realized that such an arrangement would only add to feelings of isolation.

“I thought, We are not going to accomplish what we want to accomplish if they go to the internship and then go home to a beautiful guest room and they’re alone,” she says.

Instead, she rented a five-bedroom house for the first cohort of women. The following summer, when the program grew to 34 students, she rented five houses: four in Silicon Valley and one in San Francisco.

The shared housing turned out to be one of the program’s biggest successes. Students quickly became friends, and loved being able to talk about the challenges they were facing at work with their roommates.

For Ms. Koyyalagunta, one major challenge was knowing when to stop trying to solve a problem alone, and ask for help. “I was scared of seeming like I didn’t know what I was doing. I was unsure of whether that technical problem was something trivial that I should know.”

In speaking with her roommates, she learned that each company has different internal policies and that there’s no way an intern could be expected to know everything.

Sammi Siegel, a senior who participated in DTech both summers, says the strong sense of community persisted when the students returned to Duke. The DTech students often sit together in classes and encourage each other to speak up.

Her internships allowed Ms. Siegel, a gender-studies minor, to appreciate how technology could be used to solve social problems, and to meet other students who shared that goal.

“It was really about finding a community of people who were like-minded,” she says. Mentorship is another important component of the DTech program. Ms. Siegel was assigned a mentor with whom she had periodic phone calls throughout the summer. At one point, she mentioned that co-workers frequently questioned her about why she’d made certain coding decisions and that she had trouble explaining her reasoning. Her mentor encouraged her to take notes while she was working and to give those notes to her teammates when she turned in her work.

Mariam Sulakian, a Duke junior, found a mentor in her manager at Facebook, where she interned this past summer. Her manager encouraged her not to stay at the office too late and to enjoy life outside work. “She’s so good at what she does, and she has such a great work-life balance,” Ms. Sulakian says.

The students in DTech met with other women in the field at networking events throughout the summer. Ms. Sulakian says those events were an opportunity to learn about career options, and helped her imagine what a tech career could look like five or 10 years down the road.

Janice E. Cuny, program director for computing education at the National Science Foundation, says that creating a cohort is a good idea for any program with the goal of diversifying the technology sector. Sending a lone student from an underrepresented group into a field that is predominantly white and male “enhances the feeling of not belonging,” she says.

Ms. Cuny added that it’s important to show women that they can use computer science to do good. She was instrumental in an effort to launch a new Advanced Placement course in computer science, called “Computer Science Principles,” which is geared toward students who don’t have much coding experience. The first classes started last year and have been very popular with women.

“There are lots of people who want to do things for a cause,” Ms. Cuny says. “We haven’t really attracted those people. These courses try to get the students doing interesting things. That’s been able to excite a lot more women.”

Share of Female Comp-Sci Majors Is Edging Back Up
In the 1970s, computer science stood out from other STEM fields in having nearly as many female majors as male ones. That changed in the subsequent decades. New efforts at several universities are trying to pull more women into the field.

Bringing more women into computer science on the college level has required an effort to change cultural perceptions of the field, according to Marie desJardins, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

“Starting in the 1980s,” she says, “computers were marketed entirely to boys. Video games, same thing.” Men gravitated toward the industry, which came to be associated with “wild parties with striptease or nerdy guys in cubicles,” she adds.

Those Silicon Valley stereotypes may not have been accurate at first, but they have become more truthful as the industry has become increasingly lucrative, powerful, and male-dominated. Though video games might spark confidence with computers, they do not necessarily make someone good at computing, Ms. desJardins says. Furthermore, young women are not always taught that computing can lead to a career designing programs to help students with disabilities or guide viewers through a museum, for example.

Ms. Koyyalagunta had no idea she would enjoy computing until that day in the Duke neuroscience lab when she first worked with code.

“Until I was asked by someone to do something and I was forced into it, I didn’t realize how much I would love it,” she says.

She has returned to Duke with much more confidence in her abilities. At the end of the summer, she got an offer to join the team she interned with at Apple when she graduates. She’s not yet sure she’ll take it, but she is sure of this: One way or the other, she’ll be working in tech.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.