A broad national coalition of leaders from academia, government, industry, and non-profit organizations has mobilized to form the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), to address the issue of low participation of women in information technology (IT). The Center's twenty-year goal is workplace parity: equal participation for women and men in IT industrial and academic careers. The strategy for meeting this goal is to embrace and leverage existing efforts within a systemic, broad approach that: collects, assesses, and aggressively disseminates effective practices; encompasses the full education and career pipeline; and conducts new research and develops new programs where most needed, based upon measurement and data. The University of Colorado at Boulder, in collaboration with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, has received a CISE Special Projects award that will provide a portion of the funding for the NCWIT's infrastructure, research and application, with an emphasis upon the areas of undergraduate education, graduate education, and faculty careers, and collaboration with a broad set of universities through the Center's academic alliance.
Several main projects in the Center will be conducted with the support of this award. The effective practices in undergraduate curriculum project will collect approaches for enhancing undergraduate education in computer science/IT that increase the participation and success of women, provide additional evaluation where needed, actively disseminate the most effective approaches, and suggest adjustments to undergraduate curriculum and educational approaches as appropriate. The community college pipeline project will determine effective practices for recruiting women from community colleges to four-year degree programs in computer science (CS) and IT. The graduate admissions criteria project will study a cohort of CS graduate students over a multi-year period, exploring their preparation and qualifications for graduate school and their experiences, progress and successes. The faculty careers project will research the factors that help or hinder women attain senior leadership positions in academic CS and IT departments, and will identify best practices that help women advance to senior leadership positions.
The intellectual merit of this project is multi-dimensional. The NCWIT, under the leadership of Dr. Robert Schnabel, will coordinate activities of scientists in seven organizations, pulling together their research efforts on women in IT as well as collecting, evaluating and disseminating best practices. The Center has the potential to significantly contribute to scholarship in the field of gender equity in IT, as well as to act as a facilitator for translating the research findings in this area to practice. Girls and women are participating in information technology (IT) at very low rates, and the situation is not improving. The broader impact of NCWIT's activities lies in its potential to increase the number of girls and women entering and staying in IT.
