Did You Know?

NPR recently spotlighted results from a Nielsen Co. evaluation of 60,000 wireless customers’ bills, and the results are fascinating.  Those of you who attended the NCWIT May 2010 Summit breakout by Shireen Mitchell (founder of Digital Sista) will recognize a correlation with the statistics she cited.  Here are some examples:

• Blacks and Hispanics talk on the phone more than whites.
• Blacks are more likely than whites to use their phones to access the Internet.
• Women talk and text more than men.

Then there’s this little nugget: “The Nielsen panel of 60,000 households was weighted to match the Census. However, it looked only at households that got phone bills. People who have prepaid service generally don't get bills and make up about 20 percent of wireless subscribers.”

What do you think?  To what degree might access to technology, and the how/why of technology use, impact a person’s likelihood to consider a technology vocation?

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A piece in CNN Money this week profiles Sal Khan, a former hedge fund manager who recently has become famous on YouTube for his simple, clear video lectures on topics ranging from algebra to economics to SAT prep. Khan, who has an MBA from Harvard, as well as a BS in math and a BS and a master's in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, started out by making a video to help remotely tutor his 7th grade cousin in math.  The videos he created turned into “Khan Academy,” whose more than 1,600 videos have now received 18+ million hits.  Even Bill Gates has jumped on his bandwagon, saying  "It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources," and "I'd say we've moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category.” Detractors say that the videos are simply tutorials, and aren’t a substitute for the classroom, with its teacher/student interaction and performance testing.

What do you think?  Do you think we’ll see more free, online education like this? Do you think this kind of educational resource is more of a supplement, or a substitute for traditional education?

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At General Mills Inc., the average tenure for an IT staffer is about 13 years; and 16 years for an IT manager. Turnover is below the industry average of 5, and more than 15% of the company's IT staffers hold MBAs. According to Computerworld, this hiring and retention pattern represents a business strategy: “companies … are looking to hire smart, tech-savvy, collaborative business professionals for 20- or 30-year multifaceted careers, not for IT jobs.” According to Xerox CIO, John McDermott, "The movement of talent between organizations is at the most senior levels and pretty significant," he says. "The previously impenetrable wall between IT and the business became permeable."

What do you think? Is your company hiring people with multiple skillsets – not just IT? Does your company groom talented employees for an extended tenure? Does it allow for lateral mobility between IT and other segments of the business?

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Computerworld features an article this week looking at whether colleges are adequately preparing students for the complexities and rapidly changing needs of the IT workforce. In interviews with IT companies, the magazine asks whether schools are teaching vital soft skills, such as project management and business basics: "You bring a programmer or network administrator on board, and they don't have the big-picture view of how the business runs. One recent hire … could program user interfaces but had no concept of a database. Another didn't know what an invoice was.” To address the gap between college and real-world experience, the ACM has introduced new curriculum guidelines for undergraduate IT programs that address how computing is manifested in industries such as law, health, finance and government.

What do you think?  Does your department work with industry in updating its curriculum? Should computer science education be required to include complementary, “real-world” skillsets?
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Many of you are familiar with technology transfer programs at universities and how these programs sometimes lead to technology patents, spinoff companies, and – in some cases – hefty profits.  NPR recently profiled the University of Utah, which surprisingly has one of the best track records in the country for the number of successful spin-offs it has produced.  “When it comes to creating new start-ups from academic research, only MIT compares to the University of Utah — despite the fact that MIT's research budget is five times larger.”  School officials, who lately have entertained numerous visits from other institutions looking to mimic their success, chalk it up to a rich and collaborative entrepreneurial ecosystem – “a focus on the entrepreneurial process as a scholarly activity."

What do you think? Can academics and scientists be trained to become entrepreneurs?  How might more universities incorporate entrepreneurism into their technology education?

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Did You Know? is a brief round-up of news, events, resources, and other factoids that crossed our radar this week and we think are worth sharing. Got an interesting conversation-starter to share? Let us know.

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Leveling the CS1 Playing Field

Computer Science I (CS1) is the first class that incoming students take at DePauw University, creating a key opportunity to recruit female computer science (CS) majors.  Our NCWIT Academic Alliance Seed Fund project, "Leveling the CS1 Playing Field," uses a unique early intervention approach to increase the number of female CS majors.

First, the project leader sends each first-year woman student a mailing that contains a letter of welcome and introduction, profiles the "success stories" of young women in CS, and provides information about computing research opportunities and careers. Our data analysis found that CS1 classes where women students had received this mailing enrolled 10% more women than those classes whose female members did not receive the mailing.

The Seed Fund award allowed us to take the project to a new level.  We created a DVD the first year of the project that includes short scenes from an actual CS1 classroom, a brief interview with a computer science major, and text overlays with information such as starting salaries for computer science majors.

During the second year of the project, we mailed the DVD and a letter to one-third of the first-year women and sent email with a link to the DVD to another one-third.  We also began surveying these two target groups and a control group, along with the students in the CS1 classes. 

Through the generous funding from Microsoft Research, we will continue the project for several more years, until we have sufficient data collected for appropriate analysis. Thanks to our friends at Microsoft Research and NCWIT!

Gloria Childress Townsend is a professor of computer science at DePauw University.

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Did You Know?

Did You Know? is a brief round-up of news, events, resources, and other factoids that crossed our radar this week and we think are worth sharing. Got an interesting to share? Let us know.

Will the next Google be started by a woman?  That’s the question posed by an op-ed piece from Reuters columnist Tereza Nemessanyi, founder and CEO of Honestly Now Inc. She starts out by looking at the recent investment of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers in a new business run by Kathy Savitt, former CEO of American Eagle Outfitters.  Savitt, who is 47 years old and mother of two, breaks the mold for typical Kleiner Perkins investments - “white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford” – and given the VC firm’s record for investing in dot-coms that go on to become the next big thing, could she represent an emerging class of entrepreneurs? The piece goes on to provide a nice summary of the reports and commentary on women and entrepreneurship that have peppered the news and the blogosphere over the last few months.

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This summer, the nine women who make up Brown University’s junior class of computer science majors all decided to intern at Microsoft.  In forming a cohort within their internship experience, the women – a minority in their department and their classes – reveal some other common attributes: several of them stumbled upon computer science by way of another field; many of them suffered a lack of confidence prior to this internship experience, which now has them excited about computing careers; and all chose to intern at Microsoft as a result of Microsoft’s personalized recruiting and outreach.

Do you have a story to share about women in your organization? We want to know.

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The results of the 2010 ACT – a test of college readiness taken by high-schoolers nationwide – are in, and they are interesting.  Many major media outlets have reported on the results, in different ways: The Wall Street Journal highlighted college readiness (or the lack thereof); Education Week focused on the growth and gap for minority groups; and The San Jose Mercury News looked at the performance of Santa Clara County students – the kids in Silicon Valley’s backyard. Here are just some of the interesting data to consider:

• A chart mapping the educational and career aspirations against projected demand actually breaks out computing (it’s one of the top five fastest-growing sectors), and shows that the projected demand for hires with a computing degree is FIVE TIMES greater than the projected supply.
• Students aspiring to pursue computing fields had higher math and science achievement scores than those pursuing the other fastest-growing sectors.
• Students who took the “core curriculum” in high school were much more  likely to pass all four ACT benchmarks (English, reading, math, science) and earned higher ACT scores, just one sign of how important it is to ensure that computing becomes a part of that core curriculum; however, still less than a quarter of all high-schoolers who took the test scored high enough to be deemed college-ready, which may indicate that even our core curriculum needs a boost. (For more on how you can help implement CS Principles, a proposed new computing course from NSF and AP, we encourage you to check out www.ncwit.org/csprinciples.)
• Although still low, the numbers of Latino students who both took the ACT and passed the benchmarks have jumped significantly.

You can find all the results at the ACT website.

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A study from Rice University on men and women scientists in academia provides some remarkable insights into gender differences in perception of family life, careers, and happiness. Focusing on departments of physics (traditionally a low proportion of women) and biology (traditionally a higher proportion of women), the researchers surveyed men and women scientists about whether they chose to have fewer children as a result of their career choices, whether they were satisfied with their careers and family, and the degree to which they experienced work-life tension and support from their departments.  The survey results are fascinating – and in some cases surprising:

According to the survey, "a lower percentage of female scientists have children, and of those who do have children, they have fewer on average than men, averaging 1.9 versus men's 2.1." Ecklund and Lincoln sought to use the data to draw broader conclusions. "These analyses suggest that experiences of parenthood are different for male and female scientists, that women who have successfully pursued academic science careers have different expectations for parenthood possibilities or that people who persist in science careers are different from those who drop out along the way," they wrote. 

They found that fewer male physicists than male biologists (79 percent vs. 87 percent) are married, are less likely to have children and have fewer children. "Male biologists, however, report working more hours per week than male physicists, are somewhat less happy with their jobs and are significantly more likely to report a lack of departmental and university support," Ecklund and Lincoln wrote. "Because there are proportionally more men in physics when compared to biology, this latter finding is consistent with the general organizational finding that individuals are happier when they work with those who are similar to them."

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Did You Know?

This week Forbes published a terrific article on serial entrepreneurs featuring profiles of several (technical) women. Instead of taking a gendered lens, however, the author focuses on the qualities that ALL serial entrepreneurs must have in common: tenacity, passion, love for new challenges, and a willingness to take risks. The result is that the women profiled seem to stand out for their accomplishments and skills, rather than simply for being women.

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Even as summer draws to a close, we’re still seeing lots of news about companies sponsoring tech summer programs for girls. This week we saw that IBM hosted a “Girls Go TechKnow” day at its Yorktown, NY facility; and Microsoft sponsored a DigiGirlz camp in Reno, NV (DigiGirlz also is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year!) 

If you’ve thought about hosting or co-sponsoring a summer computing program, don’t forget to check out our resource on this topic, “Offer Computing Workshops and Camps: They Benefit Both Students and the Teachers Who Offer Them.” And if you have an upcoming program that you’d like to promote, please tell us about it – we’d love to help you spread the word!

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In a 2007 NCWIT paper by Joanne Cohoon and Bill Aspray, “Networking and Access to Social Capital: A Review of Research Literature on Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Information Technology Field,” the authors found that access to personal and professional social networks can influence “ the success and survival of an entrepreneur’s business,” and that “women may have less or different access to social capital than men have.”

So what do gender and IT entrepreneurship have to do with car thieves?  If you think that sounds like a chapter from Freakonomics, well, you’re right.  At the Freakonomics blog this week, a column titled, “Why Car Thieves Are Male” looks at the reasons why men are more likely to profit from stealing cars:

“Both male and female thieves are ‘mentored’ by more experienced thieves in much the same way; however, men have an advantage when it’s time to sell the stolen goods. ‘They are more connected to a social network of criminals that provides access to chop shops, where the cars can be dismantled and sold for parts’ … ‘Without these contacts the ability to profit from auto theft was significantly curtailed.’”

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Did you see the piece from The New York Times this week about researchers at the University of Washington who “crowd-sourced” a biotech challenge? After creating a video game that matched human players against software in protein-folding “puzzles,” researchers found that  “video game players matched the results generated by software solutions in three of the puzzles, outperformed them in five cases and found significantly better solutions in two others.”

The research, published in the current issue of Nature, is a wonderful example of how people and computers can improve each other. We also think it has inspiring implications both for fields such as genetics research, and for encouraging people from varied backgrounds to consider CS (and video games, for that matter) as a means to accelerate their careers.

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In her Huffington Post column this week, Caroline Simard writes about  how “The High-Tech Industry Must Adapt to the Reality of Dual-Career Couples.” Research from the Anita Borg Institute shows that 82% of technical women are partnered with someone who works full time, compared to 37% of men. The challenge of juggling family and career, however, is increasingly affecting men, too: according to a 2008 report from the Families and Work Institute, work-life conflict was reported by 59% of the fathers and 39% of the mothers in dual-earner households.

These findings underscore the need for employers to recognize that employees of both genders (whether married or parents or not) benefit from universal policies that allow flexible scheduling, clearly state and recognize employee performance metrics, and examine promotion and task assignment processes for bias. For more information about how to implement policies like this, check out chapter three of Women in IT: The Facts.  

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