tl;dr- Apparently Carnegie Mellon University recently got an incoming first-year undergraduate class that was 48% female for Computer Science. They seem light on the details, but their press release stressed a focus on social activities in the curriculum.
###Maybe try whatever Carnegie Mellon did: increased social focus?
Maybe try whatever Carnegie Mellon did: increased social focus?
In this question's chatroom, @ElizabethHenning had pointed out that Carnegie Mellon University has recently reported near-gender-parity in an incoming class of first-year undergraduate Computer Science majors:
Women make up more than 48 percent of incoming first-year undergraduates this fall in Carnegie Mellon University's top-ranked School of Computer Science (SCS), setting a new school benchmark for diversity.
[...]
Women and men are judged by the same standards for admission, and retention rates historically have been the same for both, he noted.
-"Women Are Almost Half of Carnegie Mellon's Incoming Computer Science Undergraduates" (2016-09-11)
This was a goal that they'd sought for a few decades now. How'd they do it?
Blum was instrumental in establishing Women @ SCS, a faculty/student organization that helps women make connections across the school, and in recognizing that it's the computer science culture — not the curriculum — that needs to change to accommodate women.
[...]
"Computer science at Carnegie Mellon has a very social atmosphere," Blelloch said. "Most of the classes encourage students to work in groups, developing skills they will need to function in teams in the workplace. It's one of the reasons employers like our graduates so much."
-"Women Are Almost Half of Carnegie Mellon's Incoming Computer Science Undergraduates" (2016-09-11)
Still, if Carnegie Mellon only provided a more social environment, that'd seem to help explain higher retention rates, but not higher enrollment. So, presumably they somehow advertised this more-social-culture. I'm not immediately seeing the details about how they accomplished that.
There're other issues that aren't so obvious. For example, apparently the same people claiming credit for this have been trying to increase female enrollment for decades now. So, why success only recently? Did they finally figure out some secret or fine-tune their process? Did their strategy take time to start working? Was this a fluke?
Whatever the case, a lot of the information and claims on this topic seem like bunk. And since Carnegie Mellon appears to have empirically demonstrated a method, it seems like they'd be a potentially interesting case study.
For further reading, Carnegie Mellon has a women's group called women@scs. Their page includes papers and a FAQ.
