No Women In CS? Well, Not For Long

Bonnie McLindon, a junior computer science major at Stanford University, fumes as she works in CS 103, her hardest class at Stanford, office hours. The two guys sitting behind her are referring to the tinsel in her hair, a tradition of Stanford’s Kappa Alpha Theta sorority. Despite serving as section leader and interning at Apple, McLindon struggles with the stereotype that girls, especially sorority girls, don’t major in computer science.

In 2009, the Stanford CS department revamped its undergraduate curriculum, broadening the program so students could focus on tracks in areas that most interested them. Stanford Professor Mehran Sahami says the addition of multi-disciplinary tracks, such as collaboration with psychology, product design, and others, helped to cast a broader net for potential CS majors.

The department has seen growth across the board since the 2009 revisions, Sahami says, with female enrollment increasing faster on a relative basis. Since 2009, the number of female undergraduates majoring in CS at Stanford has increased by 9.5 percent.

The introductory course, CS 106A, has exploded in popularity and has reached a near celebrity status. Around 600 students (10 percent of the entire undergraduate population) take the class every quarter and over 90 percent of undergraduates will take at least one CS class, usually 106A, before they graduate. This past fall, so many students enrolled in the class that they were sitting on the floor and in the corridors of the packed auditorium.

Many students continue from 106A to further develop their skills in CS 106B. But those who want to major in computer science must continue from 106B to the daunting 107, often considered a “weeding” class to separate the wheat from the chaff before students can take upper-level courses.

Women do just as well as men in CS 106A and 106B but continue on to 107 in far fewer numbers. While many students, regardless of gender, drop the class, several students say that stereotypes, misconceptions, and lack of confidence cause women to drop the class in large numbers. The often anti-social, male-dominated culture is characterized by 107’s unofficial mantra of “dump your girlfriend before this class.”

Further broadening the gap is the fact that, on average, women at Stanford take their first CS class later than their male counterparts, often because they come to Stanford with less CS experience from their secondary schooling.

Sophia Westwood is a senior CS major who has worked at Google and Palantir, led CS sections, and is very active in recruiting more women to the major. She says her roommate took 106A the winter of sophomore year, loved it, and would have majored in it had she taken it earlier in her undergraduate career.

Despite taking programming classes in high school, Westwood didn’t consider CS as a major when she came to Stanford, fearing that she would be typing away in a cubicle all day and that all of her classmates would be stereotypes from The Social Network.

Her first professor in 106A recognized her ability and told her to consider the CS major, answering her questions about CS and its applications. When she realized she could use the degree for social good—she raves about Palantir’s work helping relief agencies prepare for Hurricane Sandy—Westwood was sold.

In the fall of 2011, Westwood organized a group of CS 106A section leaders to identify the best female freshmen and sophomores in each of their sections and invited them to small dinners sponsored by the department. The idea was for faculty and CS majors to mix with first- and second-year undergrads in an informal setting to answer their questions and encourage them to consider CS as a major. They now hold a dinner every quarter in response to high demand. Westwood estimates 50-70 people attend each dinner, and recent graduates who work in the industry return and share their experiences, both at Stanford and in the field.

“We didn’t know most of the girls in CS,” senior section leader Molly Mackinlay says. “Suddenly you recognized faces in your classes.”

Bonnie McLindon went to the first dinner in the fall of 2011 and talked to senior and junior CS majors, learning more about their work in the classroom and at internships before declaring. She says the dinners helped change her notions of being unable to handle the major or not being a good fit.

“I think people are really starting to break that down and say, ‘I can be a sorority girl and a CS major. I can be an athlete and a CS major,’” McLindon tells me. “The idea of ‘you have to fit a certain mold’ is evaporating.”

Westwood says that from these meetings with students, the section leaders have collected a ton of informal, anecdotal data about the kinds of things that almost a hundred female undergrads who are considering CS are thinking. She says the two biggest factors have been a lack of confidence — especially not having a sense of belonging in the department and field — and not understanding what CS is really about and its applications.

The students at these dinners have been selected by their section leaders as some of the most skilled in the entry-level classes, yet Westwood says students’ low confidence often makes it feel like they’re talking to the bottom of the class.

“It’s a delicate subject with the chats,” junior CS major and section leader JJ Liu says. “We don’t want to push females into CS because that’s definitely not good for anyone. It’s not a numbers game.”

Facebook director of engineering Jocelyn Goldfein has attended the dinners before and argues that universities need to stop being so reserved about encouraging undergrads to take one major over another. She believes departments need to be less shy about telling students that it’s better for them and better for the country if they major in CS.

Ayna Agarwal and Ellora Israni describe themselves as “good girls gone geeks.” Agarwal came to Stanford with an intention to be pre-vet while Israni intended to study psychology; the two juniors now study Symbolic Systems and CS, respectively.

“I think a major reason we have so few female engineers is the lack of concrete role models–that is, the lack of individuals we can point to and say, ‘Look, if you pursue technology, you could be her someday,’ Israni tells me.

The duo founded she++ in January 2012 as a Stanford community for women in tech, hoping to inspire more women to go geek. Unlike Westwood and the section leaders’ dinners, Agarwal and Israni look to make an impact beyond Stanford.

“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.