Editorial: Expand tech ed’s female appeal by expanding goals

We wrote about it last summer. After nearly 20 years of trying, Colorado universities and others nationwide were showing little if any progress in recruiting female students to important engineering and computing programs.

At CU Boulder, the female students comprised 14 percent of the enrollment base in computer science, with Colorado State University showing a rate of 8 percent.

Technologists have long warned that this low rate of participation has harmed technology companies. Educators and others are all too well aware of the problem. If you have only a narrow population of people developing software and hardware, it ultimately will fail to address the problems and opportunities that lie in the larger market.

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This holds true not just for women but people of color as well.

In the 1980s, when there was a major push to attract more women and minorities to a variety of professions, some institutions made great strides. In 1985, according to the Boulder-based National Center for Women and Information Technology, women accounted for 37 percent of computing science graduates nationwide. But by 2012, the center noted it had fallen to just 18 percent.

Experts have searched for years for fail-proof methods to lure more women to technical fields, including special clubs and summer camps sponsored by universities and mentoring programs.

But now, thanks to the work of some researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, a much more effective approach may be within everyone’s grasp.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Lina Nilsson describes a fascinating effort under way at the UC-Berkeley-based Blum Center for Developing Economies. Nilsson, an engineer, works at the center and has been part of a yearlong effort to offer a Ph.D. minor in development engineering for any students interested in technologies and other programs that help low-income communities.

The program, launched last fall, immediately attracted a student population that was 50 percent female.

Curious if other universities were seeing similar trends, Nilsson and her colleagues reached out and discovered that other schools with engineering programs geared toward helping the environment, the poor or the sick consistently were attracting large numbers of female students.

For instance, a year-old program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focusing on technologies designed to reduce poverty had a first wave of enrollees that was 74 percent female.

Programs at the University of Michigan and Arizona State University, among others, reported similar results.

Nilsson says there is an important truth here. “It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child-care centers. … It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity – it is about doing better engineering for us all.”

We agree.