This award provides partial support for preparation and targeted dissemination of a special issue of the ACM SIGCSE Bulletin--a special issue on "Women and Computing". Women are significantly underrepresented in computing and this funding supports dissemination of the special issue to K-12 teachers attending the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) at which K-12 teachers represent a large segment of the attendees. This particular audience is believed to be very important in helping to inform students at a relatively early age of the opportunities in this field. Further, it is expected that the availability of this special issue to this particular group may have the potential in the long term to begin to help alleviate the problem of underrepresentation of women in this field. Volunteers at the conference disseminate the free issues to the K-12 teachers from the ACM exhibit booth. The Editor-in-Chief of the SIGCE newsletter and the two ACM-W Co-chairs oversee the dissemination.
Other copies of the special issue are being distributed to university department chairs, to attendees at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, to ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) Chairs, and to a number of ACM sponsored conferences. These latter dissemination efforts are being carried out with support from the ACM Executive Committee and a number of other ACM groups, including the ACM Council, ACM-W, and the SIG Project Fund.
