Having women in the department is just step one. But then there is the issue of how teaching assignments are distributed. There I was, idly looking over my department’s teaching responsibilities for 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, congratulating myself for being so on top of things that I had planned the next two year. But then the little irritating voice in the back of my head began to get louder and louder and ever more clear. I looked closely at the schedule and had a distressing realization. Despite that fact that my department faculty is half women (unfortunately that will drop to one-third in the fall), graduating CS majors are likely to have had only one intermediate or upper level course taught by a woman.
Why is this? you might ask. Well, an interesting situation has evolved. We basically have three groups of courses: Group 1: a large number of introductory courses (six different theme-based CS1 courses); Group 2: a set of intermediate courses that students can take after the intro – a CS major can count only one of these, but non-majors, CS minors, and computational methods minors can count many; Group 3: the intermediate and upper level courses that are taken by majors. Guess what. The majority of Group 1 and Group 2 courses are taught by the women faculty. But the only Group 3 courses taken by majors that are regularly taught by women are the courses that count toward the theory requirement. Everything else in Group 3 that is offered on a regular basis is usually taught by a male faculty member.
So, is this the result of some concerted calculated effort by a group of male computer scientists? No! I’ve been making the schedule every year for the last seven years! But then why did this happen? My guess is that the women in the department have been more enthusiastic about recruiting new students through the cool intro and non-majors intermediate courses, and the men have been more comfortable sticking with the tried and true courses that you usually find in a CS major.
What will we do about it? Fortunately, I have a giant spreadsheet of everyone’s teaching preferences, so I know exactly what courses they are willing to teach, and we can start to mix it up more. And when I stop being department chair and teach more courses I’ll take on more of those upper level courses. That should balance things out a bit.
But I think there’s a lesson here. Be ever vigilant, because there’s always a deeper level of analysis you can do before you decide that you’ve truly addressed the gender issues or the women in computing question. I don’t think that you have to have women faculty in order to recruit women into CS, but if you have women faculty then they really should be well represented at every level of your curricular structure, both in K-12 CS as well as at the college level.
Lesson learned here. I hope I’ll have better news down the road!
Valerie Barr
Chair, CSTA Computational Thinking Task Force