Communications of the ACM
No Women in Cs? Well, Not For Long
Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni were co-founders of she++, Stanford University's first ever conference for women in technology.
Credit: Forbes
Less than 21 percent of undergraduate computer science (CS) majors at Stanford University are female, and many students say stereotypes, misconceptions, and lack of confidence cause women to drop the introductory CS lasses in large numbers. Research indicates that the two biggest factors for the dearth of female CS students is a lack of confidence and not having a firm grasp of what CS is really about and what its applications are.
Stanford students Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni recently founded she++, a Stanford community for women in tech. "We would like to see a self-sustaining community of female technologists in the Bay Area working to collaborate with and inspire each other to make technology a field as welcoming to women as it is to men, and to have this community be a model for similar microcosms throughout the nation and the world," Israni says. The organization has collected a database of collegiate role models, nominated by professors and friends, from around the U.S. to feature on their Web site.
Many major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, also are working to improve the college demographics in CS departments.
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