LUCY SANDERS: Hello, everyone. My name is Lucy Sanders and I’m the CEO of NCWIT. And, before I came to NCWIT, which is housed at the University of Colorado, I worked for 25 years in telecommunications in Bell Labs. So, I am a computer scientist by education and by passion and by love. NCWIT is a real passion of mine to really make sure that we’re continuing to build the pipeline for girls and women in computing. So, I wanted to start with a little bit of background for you all since… How many of you this is your first summit? Okay, good, awesome. So, let’s set the context for why we need NCWIT. And these numbers are roughly right numbers. I’m sure all of you understand that data can be an imprecise science sometimes. These are the numbers we have today. And I think it’s just good to set the context so that you all understand what we are working towards. So, 13% is roughly the number of computer science AP test takers in high school who are girls. It also happens to be roughly the number of four year degree recipients in computing and information systems from the top several hundred universities in the country. 25% is the percentage of the workforce, broader IT workforce, made up of women. So, obviously, women are coming from other degrees besides CIS into the IT workforce. But they make up roughly 25% of the IT workforce. 74% of women in technology report liking to work in technology once they hit the workforce and are active. However, 56% leave corporate technical roles by mid-career. Now, there’s a lot of other data underneath that 56%. We probably don’t have time to go into it right now. It’s complicated where they’re going. You may be saying “Where are they going?” And trust me. Some of them are leaving for family obligations, but not as large a number as you think. Some of them are going to public sector IT jobs away from corporate, private sector IT jobs. Some of them are leaving to start their own companies. Some of them are leaving tech. ‘Cause that’s where they’re going. But it leads to the 5% number, which happens to be the percentage of technology leadership positions that are held by women. So, the CIO, CTO, R and D vice president, lead architect fellow. Where innovation happens. The people driving innovation. So, generally speaking, we know that women are not helping to invent the technology of the future. They are not. And they’re not in the leadership positions. They’re dropping out of the workforce. And they’re certainly not participating as much in innovation as we would like them to be. So, with that in mind, I want you to kind of go back in time to around 2003. The National Science Foundation, of course, was interested in this. In addition to being chartered with helping to fund and set the direction for US research, primary research in computing, they also care about workforce readiness. The workforce skills of the 21st century. And they have been working long and hard on turning the corner in this particular issue of girls and women in computing. And they wanted more progress more, better, sooner, faster. So, they asked a group of people to convene in Boulder, Colorado and to come up with a comprehensive, long term, sustained approach at this. Full ecosystem, full pipeline. No small task. But we did it. And what I’m about ready to describe to you is how NCWIT sort of came out of all of this. I think you’ll see that the strategy’s fairly interesting. I want to pick apart this slide for just a moment. Our mission at NCWIT is to significantly increase girls’ and women’s participation in computing. I think, from the numbers, I hope you see significantly is in order. And meaningful is very important, too. We care what they’re doing. We want them helping to invent the products and services that our world depends on. We want their thoughts, their dreams, their ideas, their approach. We want them to invent things. We don’t know what women will invent if they were inventing the technology of the future, because, right now, they, by and large, are not. And so, we care about what they’re doing. And you may be also saying “What’s information technology? Give me a definition.” Well, I’m gonna disappoint you on that one again, because we’re purposefully vague on that. It doesn’t really do us any good to be very precise about what we mean by it. We mean anything having to do with computers, information, data, the whole thing. We’re very pervasive about this. Make sense? Okay, good. So, before NCWIT, one of the things we noticed at this plenary session, if you look at the diagram, you see there are a number, at the time in 2003 and today, there are a number of programs. Many of you are associated with these programs. All across the pipeline from K-12 to post-secondary into corporate into startups into the public sector. Who were focusing on girls and women in computing and who care about it. Who really are change leader organizations. But they existed in isolation. There was no connective tissue. There was no coming together as a community and sharing practices and sharing resources and setting a national agenda, studying a national dialogue, and really moving forward as a community, as a movement. And so, as a result, if you added up the impact of all of these isolated programs, it wasn’t nearly as large as it could have been. I like to say it’s like having computers with no network. The impact of what you can do, the applications of what you can do severely limited if it’s just one computer per person. So, NCWIT aims to bring all these change leaders organizations together. All of you. And really form a community. A community that’s active all year long. We’ll talk about that. A community that is working not just on their own organizations, but also in national outreach efforts and action. And so, you can see that nice little graphic. NCWIT is a change leader network. That’s the way to think about us. We are an organization of organizations. All of whom are focused on girls and women in computing. And so, learning communities means we’re in action all year. And you all are advising us in helping set the national agenda. Evidence really implies that everything we do needs to be based on the best possible evidence we can find at the moment. And, actually, we’re working to create more and more evidence as we move new and different research projects. And then action is really around forming national campaigns that you all can participate in that are efficient, fast, where you can act on a local level and know that you have national impact. So, you’ll hear about these alliances. You may have already checked your program for the summit. Our member organizations. We have over 300 and growing organizations as part of NCWIT right now. We believe we’re getting closer to 325 or so. Maybe even more. After all of you join, it’ll be even more. So, K-12 alliance consists of large, national not for profits. Many are girl serving. Some are girl and boy serving. But they, again, are working on large national outreach programs. The K-12 alliance has an estimated reach of over half the girls in the United States. And a number of adult stakeholders, as well as a growing number of young men. The academic alliance, over 200 universities focused on improved practices in the way they recruit in curriculum, in pedagogy, in all kinds of things. And I have some results to tell you about the academic alliance to brag about them just a bit. Workforce alliance is for corporations. Large corporations. Many of whom are multinational. And they are also working on recruiting, retaining, and advancing technical women. They’ve had a special focus on mid-career technical women. The entrepreneurial alliance is for startup companies. Making sure that they recruit technical women into their companies right from the start. So, that is, they grow their company. They grow their culture. It’s part of their DNA. The affinity group alliance is a new alliance that we’re launching here at this summit that will convene women’s technical affinity groups. So, they can be corporate. They can be local. They can be state. They can be technical, like LinusChix. So, they can be any type of affinity group. And then a social science advisory board is a group of very distinguished research scientists who have a focus on technology and girls and women. And they get together and think big brain ideas. It’s really fascinating hanging around with social scientists. I would recommend it. It’s great. So, these alliances, three are very established. The workforce alliance, the academic alliance, the K-12 alliance. They’ve had projects, committees, lots of success. They’re moving… They’re starting to move the needle. The academic alliance, 60% of our universities report increased percentages of women enrolled in their programs, for example. And they are just on fire with all kinds of programs. They’re working and thinking about community colleges now. They’re thinking about research experience for undergraduates. Really, a very powerful group. Workforce alliance has done some real cutting edge research on technical women in the workforce. And they’ve just completed a study on male influencers. Men who advocate for technical women and why they do it. They’ve done a patent report. They’ve done a report on women in IT, the facts. They’ve done some top 10 cards. And now they’re busy at work trying to roll those resources back into their corporations. And the K-12 alliance is the home alliance for our Aspirations in Computing Award. It’s also the home alliance for programs like Counselors for Computing and other types of large outreach efforts. Gotta Have IT, Young Resource Kits for Teachers, et cetera. These two alliances are pretty unique approaches. We don’t know of any other group that’s working with startup companies about recruiting and retaining technical women from the day they open the doors. And we think that not only is this good for them. It’s good for the women. Because they’re there to help shape the culture, to have the big ideas and innovation. And they’re also there to take early leadership positions in startup companies when they arise. And they’re also learning valuable entrepreneurial skills sitting right on front row of these companies. So, we’re very excited about this group. And the affinity group alliance is a great idea when you think about the millions and millions of women reached by technical affinity groups that we can really make sure that these affinity groups are sharing best practices and also pushing out content. That they’re gonna be an army. I’m very excited about them. How many of you are here for the affinity group alliance? Some of you. Yeah, it’s great. I can’t wait. Millions is our goal. Millions of women. It’s awesome. And then we talked a little bit about the social science advisory board. They are just so awesome. And their project through the last year was really working… If you were here last year, you heard Joshua Aaronson talking about asking a gender question ahead of the math SAT test and how asking that gender question triggered stereotype threat for women. Such that, if they move the question to the end of the test, women’s performance on the test improved remarkably. So, the social science advisory board took this on as a project. To try to work with College Board and other people to think about what we could do here. Great group. Alright, so that’s the community part. Alliances, projects, committees, they all have project managers. We work through the year. If you’re interested, you’ll be asked to join a committee. It’s basically an advisory role. We do the heavy lifting, but we need to hear from you. The alliances are self-governed. They all have co-chairs that come from the membership. So, our aim is to be an extension of your efforts and not a whole lot more time. However, we have to hear from you and have your participation, as well. Next thing you’ll notice is that we have a large number, a growing number, of research-backed resources that are freely available on our website. We want to make them available for free, because we believe that all change leaders need access to evidence-based resources. And, if they want to make a change, we want them to make a change based on our best possible knowledge. So, I like to tell this little story. They kind of started out like this. First of all, they said “Give us data.” So, we came up with by the numbers. And we came up with some other statistic sheets. And we came up with a few reports and a scorecard. And then they said, “Give us practices that work.” So, we came up with practice sheets. And there’s the research on one side and then there’s a case study on the other side of practices that people have tried. And evaluation, evidence from those practices. Then they said, “This is really great, but, you know, we’re busy.” This is great. I love this story. We’re busy. And I said, “Of course you are.” So, they said, “Give us programs. Give us Ad Water programs.” That’s where Programs in a Box came from. Download a mentoring program for technical women. Download a mentoring program for academic women. Download an outreach program. So that, when you go out into a high school, you don’t have to reinvent all that. So, we have a five box series on technical supervisors, for example, and inclusion. So, trying to come up with those downloadable boxes so that you can take them and use them. Use pieces of it. Put your logo on it. Put your brand on it. That’s great. We love it. And they said, “Well, you know, we need talking point cards. We need those little cheat sheet cards.” So, you’ll see a collection of talking point cards. Like, tell me the top things to say to a young woman about a career in IT. And I don’t know if Gearhard’s here yet, but Gearhard from Harvard said that our six inch What Do You Tell a Young Person About a Career in IT is the most heavily researched six inch card on the face of the planet. [laughter] And I think it’s instructive to use that as an example, of course, because we wanna make sure the messages we give our young people are not made up messages. They need to be authentic and real and as inspirational as we possibly know how to make them. But they need to be based on something. Okay, so, we did talking point cards. And then we started doing workbooks and strategy books. And, lately, you’ll see out on the table, we started top 10 cards. The top 10 things you can do to retain women in your academic program. The top 10 things you can do to help technical women in a corporation become more visible. So, you can kind of see how this rolls, right? And we’re trying to professionally design them and have them really attractive so that you take them places and you’re proud of them. And you know that they’re based on the best possible evidence that we can find. We have a new website coming. Yay. I don’t know if any of you try to find an NCWIT resource, but, when I try to find them, I can’t. So, now, we have a new resource. A new webpage where the resources are really profiled quite well. It’s based on a content management system. It’s easier to sort. It’s easier to find things based on what you’re looking for. The website itself I also much more reflective of what our membership is doing. When we first started, not surprisingly, our website was kind of like an all about us website. Here’s who we are. Here’s why we exist. Here’s our mission. But now this is all about you. It’s gonna be all about you. It’s gonna be about the resources to help you. It’s gonna be about your experience with the resources. So, we have some kiosks set up in the lobby. And, if you wanna go take it for a spin, you can. We’re gonna cut it after this summit, because my IT background told me it’s a really bad idea to cut a new website before a major event. [laughter] So, yay, I remember that one. So, look for it right after the summit. And go take it for a drive. Or, if you wanna look now, it’s at preview.mcwit.org is the preview site. Curious about your feedback. The content management makes it a whole lot easier to fix, too. If you have comments, please do send them to us. Okay, so that’s resources. And now we’re in communities. We’ve done resources and now we’re into action. And these are the kinds of action program frameworks that NCWIT puts together. And I’m gonna spend a little bit of time on some of them, but, right now, I wanna just go through them quickly. Because you’re gonna hear about them. We have a talent development program that starts in high school and goes through college called Aspirations in Computing. And, here, I just wanna thank our sponsors for this. We have corporate sponsors that make this possible. We have Bank of America. We have Microsoft. We have Google. All helping us fund the creation of this award program which actually is a talent development program. So, we’ll say a little bit more about that in a moment. We have Pacesetters, which is a group of universities and corporations that are working to set quantifiable goals to move the national needle. We have Sit With Me, which was funded by Google. Which is a national advocacy campaign. And you’ll see red chairs floating around and lapel pins tonight with red chairs. And you’ll wonder what that is. And I’ll tell you in a minute more about that. We have, courtesy of Microsoft Research, our academic alliance has a seed fund program. And this is self-run, again, by the alliance. Members form committees. They do a request for proposals. And, for 10 or $15,000 to implement a practice. To do something… A new recruiting practice. Or to do something new in the classroom. It’s very successful. The academic alliance loves this program. Symantec recently came on board and is funding a similar seed fund. Although not for as much money per chapter. For women’s computing chapters on campus for academic alliance members. So that they have some seed fund money to do things in terms of their own work. We have… The Computer Science Education Week is an example of a project we do with our great partners. ACM, CRA, the Computer Science Teachers Association. Google’s there. Microsoft’s there. Oracle’s there. We’re all working hard on getting computer science out there in the mainstream as an important discipline. And so, Computer Science Education Week. You can go find the website for that. Because, when you join up, we’ll be asking you to make a pledge during Computer Science Education Week to do something. One thing. Encourage a girl. Have an event. Whatever it is you wanna do. But it’s all part of a growing movement to make computer science more visible at the high school level. And even lower. K-12 level. Counselors for Computing is funded by the Merck Foundation. And this is putting relevant resources and the facts in professional school counselors’ hands so that they no longer discourage young people from a career in information technology. Believe it or not, a lot of people still think there are no jobs. I know. Interesting, isn’t it? So, we’re out there telling… “Oh, yes, there are jobs. There are jobs.” So, that’s Counselors for Computing. So, let me show you or tell you a bit about how some of these programs work. Because the structure is interesting. So, Aspirations in Computing started as an award program. And, when we had these summits, we would bring this award program to our various summits and we would reach out locally and we would recognize young women for creative aspirations in computing at the high school level. So, this is not the use of technology. This is the creation of technology. They would submit an application. We’d have to have a teacher endorse it. We’d have judges using a technical rubric to judge the application. And then we would find 10 winners. Bank of America saw this and said, “We wanna sponsor that at the national level.” And so, we said, “Of course. This is great.” So, now… So, then, it was 35 winners. They get $500 and a laptop and a trip to Charlotte and the most gala event. You’re all welcome to join us. Huh, Bank of America? All of you can come, too. And 35 winners. And, of course, we had to put a portal in place. So, they all went online. We started to judge online. And now more judges and all of that. And it’s great. And then some of our members go, “But, wait a minute, we were used to seeing these wonderful young women. We wanna see them, too. We wanna have regionals.” So, we started forming clusters of member corporations and universities and other organizations. And we have regionals now. 32 regionals across the country. And so, we have local winners. And now we have national. And it’s great. We have applicants from all 50 states and Puerto Rico. And we have a… It’s gone viral. Our goal is to add 1,000 new young women to this talent pool as we move. So, it’s a great program. But you think, okay, it’s an award. Great. However, it’s a whole lot more than that. So, we keep them connected on Facebook. And we offer them internship possibilities. We offer them scholarship possibilities. We offer them contests, video contests. We offer them mobile application opportunities. And, all of a sudden, we’ve got ourselves guess what? A community. And a talent development pipeline. And now they’re moving from high school on to college. We just had some of our first young women graduate from college. So, the idea is we want to add 1,000 new women a year into this talent development program. And NCWIT members are growing the talent development program by helping judge or get the word out or offer possibilities to these young women. So, this is kind of a visual representation of what I just said. So, NCWIT provides the scaffolding. You see that. Project management, the technology, the materials, the kits, the resources. Our member organizations form the regionals. Start thinking about the local level and the national level. And then we have a talent pool. They’re offering, like I said, the internships, the jobs, the scholarships, et cetera. Encouragement. So, that’s how it works. And those are our lovely winners from the national award. Looking just like a very large talent pool. So, think thousands of girls coming out of this talent pool every year. All because of the work that NCWIT members are doing. We’re very honored to support it. It is an example of acting locally and making a national difference. Does that make sense? It’s all connected. We’re all pulling the same wagon here. And it’s amazing that we can create. We can move the national needle like this when we all work together. And we are. Can you move the slide? Thank you. I don’t why it didn’t. Another example, Sit With Me. You’ll see the red chair. This came out of our Pacesetters work where we had a number of members who said, “We need a way to tell technical women that we value them.” To encourage, not support, that’s kind of a weak word. But to validate them. To really show how much we appreciate their contributions. And we really would like for them to persist. And you saw the attrition rate. So, Sit With Me came from that. It was created by a marketing company BBMG. And it’s based loosely on Rosa Parks. First, you have to sit to take a stand. And it’s a way for everybody to have a conversation. Men, women, technical, non-technical. Again, we have a website, sitwithme.org. You can start to think about the taglines. First, we have to sit to take a stand. I won’t stand for anything less. I’m sitting for the future of technology. It’s an advocacy campaign. And we’re creating it again in a way that every one of you, we hope, can implement it. We have plans. And you’ll hear more tomorrow. To roll this out nationally in the fall. Given that the funding gods are good to us. I don’t know… There we go. So, here’s some examples. We rolled this out in January to our membership. And, again, we’re over 300 organizations. So, this is quite a large membership. And you can see some of the things. My personal contribution was the red chair on the United jet. And in the cockpit. But we have Microsoft roll this out 50 events around the world on International Women’s Day. Facebook ended up painting a graffiti wall of people sitting in red chairs and then invited people in to take pictures and to make statements around their personal advocacy for technical women. You can see… I don’t know if you can recognize the gentleman in that front row. That’s Intel and Craig Barrett. So, it’s more than just photos. It’s a way to have a conversation. And what we’re finding is, when people have events or they’re doing certain things, that it starts a conversation that creates some really amazing space. And it’s not in your face. It’s not controversial. It’s fun. So, we have a number of members thinking about doing other things in this space. Like a stealth campaign. Like having chairs show up. You’ll probably see the red chair moving around this event. And you’ll see it tonight at the community reception as we continue to move. But it’s really great. It’s a lot of fun. Counselors for Computing I’m just gonna skip real quick, because I wanna make sure you all have time for questions. But, again, we mentioned this earlier. This is a resource kit for counselors. We’re again gonna put it in some type of a framework so that universities can use this kind of kit to also reach out to professional school counselors where they live. I should briefly say we work in DC. We have a non-lobbying presence in DC where we have conversations that sound like this. Computing is the most important STEM discipline. Science, technology, engineering, and math. It’s very important that we have a presence in DC so that we can help shape the national dialogue as computing professionals. Very, very important. A lot going on there. We have workshops. We have a lot of great partnerships, like I mentioned before. Computer Science Teachers Association, ACM, CRA, and a number of great corporate sponsors there, as well. To really work hard in our current focus as a community. And we’ll have more to say about this on Thursday morning. Is rebuilding computer science education in K-12 in the public school system. It’s very important. So, we’re there. Great partners. Certainly not doing it alone. But we think we need to have a presence there, because we can’t attract more young women to computing if it’s not taught in high school and it’s not taught well. So, we feel very passionate about this. One of our projects that we’ve done, because we have a research staff and we were able to do it, again, is to think about data here. So, this is… You’ll find this on our website. This is a map, by US House district… It breaks down to US House district, but it also can aggregate up to state and national. Of educational preparation in computing by US House district compared to the number of jobs predicted. So, this is to fuel your local activism. If you wanna go talk to a principal or if you wanna talk to a school district or something else, you can roll this up and look at it. So that we can put data in your hands. It was incredibly hard to do. It crosses multiple data sets. Some of which we had to buy and do other things. But it’s very useful. Oops, nope, go back. In closing. No, no. Maybe we need a battery in this thing. There, okay, so, in closing, and I wanted to leave plenty of time for questions, because I know sometimes it’s kind of… The summit, there’s a lot going on. So, we’ll say a bit about the summit, too. We think the NCWIT approach is working. The approach is that we believe in collaboration. That, together, we need to collaborate and compete against the problem. This and not against each other. This is such a severe innovation issue. This is such a severe competitiveness issue. This is a severe equity issue. That there’s no room for competition here. We need to collaborate and then compete against the problem. We believe that access to information should be free. We’re sort of open source. That, if you’re a good spirited change leader, you should have access to the facts and evidence and the research and the resources that you need to get your job done. And we believe everybody should be in action. I mean, we want an active membership. And we believe people should be in action all year long. This summit is not a conference. This summit is our community meeting. And then we go home and we’re in action and we come back again and we check in and we think about new projects and we think about where we’re headed and then we do it again. So, this is very much a community meeting rather than a conference. And I wanna also say, before I tell you a little bit about the summit, what we’re not. Sometimes people think that we’re a women’s network. And we’re not. We’re a change leader network. And that’s a really important distinction. We have so many men working with us, as well as women. And that’s a very important part of the equation here. So, we’re a change leader network. I think we’re also not a coalition or an umbrella organization. We’re a learning community. And that’s a very important distinction. And we are in action. So, we’re really change leaders trying to form a movement so that, at the end of the day, we take over everything in the world. Because I know you all know that computing people run the world, anyway. It’s just that the rest of the world doesn’t really know it. [laughter] True, right? Good, so now we need more women there and then we’ll be done. We will have total dominance. That’ll be great. One more, I think. There we go. So, here’s how the summit works. First of all, you all have your programs. The first day you’re here at the orientation and then we’ll move into several research presentations by some fabulous researchers. And we all like these types of talks, because they give us all kinds of new information that we, as computing professionals, have never thought about before. From a social science perspective. And it’s about being informed and it’s about having the best possible knowledge base for what you’re doing. Some of it you might agree with. Some of it you might not agree with. But it’s leading edge social science research that is pretty mind boggling sometimes. Tonight, at 5:30, we have the Aspirations in Computing ceremony for Illinois. So, we’re wrapping up Aspirations in Computing tonight right here. And that’ll be fun. And then we have a community reception. We always have great receptions, because we think the networking and the… It’s a celebration. It’s a celebration for all the hard work people have done through the year. And it’s a great chance to meet people and to network with other change leaders, such as yourself. The next day, we kind of go at it again. Our alliance meetings meet in the morning. And this is where the K-12, the academic, the workforce, et cetera are meeting. And, as visitors or new people, you will be joining conversations in progress. There’ll be contexts you don’t necessarily have. So, feel free to find people with NCWIT lapel pins. Or maybe you’re new and you just wanna ask somebody a question. Feel free to ask people questions as you navigate your way around. And then we have something new called flash talks. Five minute talks where the slides advance… If you don’t talk fast, your talk is gone. [laughter] And there are nine different topics that I remember submitted. And people voted. And so, it’s gonna be a great deal of fun to see what happens here. So, if we like it, we’ll do it again. And then we have nine different breakouts. And they repeat once. So, you can pick one and then you can pick a second one. And so, they’re back to back repeat. Tomorrow night, we have the innovator award, which honors a woman who has started a technology organization. And we honor Jessica Jackley who founded kiva.org. And/or you signed up for BOF dinners, Birds of Feather dinners, and you’re going out to dinner with your friends. And that should be on the back of your name tag. Whatever it is that you registered for. We close with a panel on DC, because that’s important. And with a second round of alliance meetings. And then we say adios. And then we’ll be back in touch to make sure everybody’s in action throughout the year. Oh, good, I left plenty of time for questions. So, with that, questions, comments. I can’t see you, but… Somebody ask the first one. Okay, good.
AUDEINCE MEMBER: Do you have any idea about how you’re working to get computer science taught and taught well?
LUCY SANDERS: Yes, you wanna repeat that?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Sorry, I was hoping you would comment on, briefly, about how you’re working to get computing taught in K-12 and getting it taught well.
LUCY SANDERS: So, I mean, the first thing I wanna say about that is this is a massive community effort. And there are a lot of partners at the table here. So, National Science Foundation cares about this. And they’ve been working in collaboration with the College Board and with a number of educators, K-16 educators, to pilot a new gold standard course in computing called CS Principles. There’s a website up about it. And the way that works, of course, is that, if it’s an AP course, then the universities have to say they’re going to accept it as introductory credit. And there have been some piloting. I think 20… Who knows? 20 pilots so far? I think so. 20 pilots really testing out the concepts of CS Principles and making sure that it’s rigorous, relevant, and inclusive. So, that has to happen first. And then the College Board will eventually move that into a new AP course. So, we think AP is the leverage point here. Now, but that’s not the only thing, because we don’t have… If you were to look at the state of computer science education in K-12 today, it’s pretty depressing at times. I mean, it’s taught as an elective, if it’s taught at all. Sometimes it’s taught as a literacy class and not as a fluency, creative kind of a class. So, we have our work to do to get into the local level, into the schools. And something that Jan Kooney has called CS 10K teachers. We need 10,000 teachers teaching computer science. That’s a goal. And it is an audacious goal of this community. And I’m really proud to be working with that effort, as we all are. And as everybody in this room will need to do as we take this to the local level, ’cause you’ll hear at the DC update, and I think you know it’s true, we can’t solve this issue at the federal level. We have to get more teachers. We have to be out there. We have to advocate in our school districts. We really have to work. And there are some corporations considering putting some major money into this effort, which is great. But we have a lot more work to do. But what’s exciting about it is we’re all pulling the same wagon. It’s great. And so, I’m optimistic. It’s gonna be hard work. But I’m optimistic. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: In terms of the 10K teachers program, would this work without any state certification for CS teachers?
LUCY SANDERS: Well, now you’re asking a question that’s a little out of my place. I don’t know if we’ve got our CSTA… Is Joe back here? Do I see… No. Do you wanna mention something about that or…
JOE: The certification issues. They’re individual to states. There’s only about 1/3 of states that have any kind of certification at all. There’s all kinds of issues where, in our state, for example, in Wisconsin, we’re trying to adopt the Exploring Computer Science curriculum. And we’re having… I think we’ve passed it finally. But we’re having some major debates on who can even teach the course. Even though there is excellent professional development for that curriculum. There’s people in the DPI that are saying that if it’s gonna be offered in current technical ed, then only business teachers can teach it. Even though, for example, I have a computer science background, I wouldn’t be able to teach that course, potentially, if that thinking were to continue. I think there’s gonna need to be, in each of our states, some kind of a grassroots movement, if you will, to deal with each state’s Department of Public Instruction to rethink that whole notion of certification. At least in relation to computer science. Also to help them understand what computer science really is. That it’s really more than Word and PowerPoint and stuff, which are important skills, but that’s not computer science. So, there’s certification issues that are really a state by state issue. And it is a huge problem.
LUCY SANDERS: Well, I wanna say, again, that we don’t have all the answers for this yet. I mean, there are people who are really… This is their full time job and they’re here. We’ll be talking more about it as we move through this and you’ll continue to hear more. This should be, I think, a project for all of us moving ahead. And there’ll be a lot of moving parts. And there’ll be a lot of things that need to be defined and a lot of hard work. But I feel good that the direction is emerging. And we will definitely have to do it with local advocacy. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Does NCWIT have any current data about attrition among academic women in computing and IT? And if there are any programs to address that? The drain, the shrinking pipeline.
LUCY SANDERS: Are you thinking about faculty?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Faculty.
LUCY SANDERS: Faculty. Is Joanne here? I don’t know if she’s here yet. The data. I’m gonna misrepresent this. So, does anybody actually have the facts? ‘Cause I remember that the data is actually not as bad. Is that right? Who knows? Hi Kitty. Good, phew.
KITTY: So, the National Academy did a study a couple years ago called Gender Differences. And we looked at several fields. Computer science specifically wasn’t. But we looked at mathematics and several engineering fields, which have similar patterns, and physics. And what we actually found, in the tenured track and tenured levels, the women who are in those pools actually do quite well. I think the challenge is a lot of those who are in academia are not in those pools. Particularly in R1 institutions. So, you have a lot of contingent faculty. You have a lot of people in other situations. But, for those who are actually in the pipeline for tenure track and tenure, the women are doing actually very well.
LUCY SANDERS: And people have asked us, too, about teaching faculty, as well. So, great question. Who else? Back here.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t know if this is too out of the box for this organization.
LUCY SANDERS: Probably not.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Being the mother of a teenage daughter, have you thought about approaching the entertainment industry and the magazine industry for the messages that our girls are getting?
LUCY SANDERS: Great question. And you’ll hear me later today when we open the summit to really give a big thank you to Turner Broadcasting, who’s our newest partner, who’s streaming this session live. So, I mean, there are some things that the entertainment industry can do and can’t do. And this is probably a longer conversation. But yes. The entertainment industry’s catching onto this. And I think it’s something that we’ve talked about a long time as a community. But I think it’s happening. They seem to… We’ve been getting calls from the entertainment industry guild and other people. And we’re starting to see that they do care about this. So, yes, the answer’s yes. And please thank Turner Broadcasting people when you see them. Because enlarging our footprint and being able to stream and put this information out more broadly and having them advise us on social media footprint. Very important for us. Very, very important. Anybody have anything else? Yes, please.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Who foots the bill for all of this?
LUCY SANDERS: Well, you do.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And how much influence do they have that we wish they didn’t?
LUCY SANDERS: Who foots the bill? Who foots the bill? So, we are, at the moment, funded about half through grants with the National Science Foundation. And the other half through corporate sponsorships. And how much influence do they have that I wish they didn’t? I have to honestly say we have really been fortunate in being able to drive our own boat, by and large. And I think it’s because of the fine work of all of our members. And all of the things that we’re doing that I don’t feel constrained. I feel totally empowered to go do the right thing. Doesn’t mean that I’m not gonna make mistakes. But I do feel like we’ve been really fortunate to have that kind of encouragement and support. And I think it’s because people know we’re building this big community. A movement. And we’re gonna be unstoppable. We’re gonna take over the world. There’s a theme here. Anybody have anything else? Did I answer your question? Good, okay, wonderful. Anything else? Alright, oh, one more? Yes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, hi. I understand the meaning of the organization to try and recruit more women into the computer field. That is correct, right? And what about people who are deaf people like me? We’re an even smaller interest group. We’re women and we’re deaf. And so, because deaf women is one of the smallest factions in this whole group of women. And I really want to be able to encourage more girls or women who are deaf to go into the computing field. But what I don’t know is how to deal with the discrimination that men pose on people. Can you explain a little something about that?
LUCY SANDERS: Well, there are a couple of things in response to that. Yes, in fact, we are working for all women in computing. At all levels of the pipeline. And so, this means women who are deaf and other disabilities. I won’t claim that we’re doing a perfect job there. There are other alliances that we partner with, Access Computing, which also works in this space. And we need to do more. But it is part of our mission and part of our charter to work on that. So, we care about all women. And we need to keep vigilant in that space. So, I don’t know what else to say yet about practice and so on and so forth. We did have a joint meeting with Access Computing a few years ago. And it reminds me that, perhaps, we should do something again. So, let’s talk about that. Maybe you have some ideas about what we can be doing that would make sense. That’s a perfect question for why we need our members to come in and say “These are some of the things that I see that you can do as NCWIT that would really be helpful and impactful.” So, we will have some speakers at the summit today talking about the intersection between race and gender. Which is a new conversation for us. So, we’re continuing to move that way, as well. Anybody have anything else? Okay, we have 15 minutes. And then we start the summit. So, thank you for coming. And I look forward to all your joining. [applause] Thank you.