Hacking her way in: Computer science no longer just a man'
Source: Christine Des Garennes
Marrissa Hellesen just wanted to see how the floppy drive worked.
She opened the computer, examined the drive (this was many years ago ― it ran on Windows 95 and had Internet via AOL) and then discovered colored cables, memory cards and other fascinating components. She kept going, taking things out and apart.
It was their family's only computer, and her mother wasn't exactly pleased.
But Hellesen put all the pieces back together and when she turned it back on, the PC hummed along like before.
A self-described tinkerer, the 25-year-old has found a home as a computer science student at the University of Illinois, where she is a teaching assistant and has been involved in organizing hackathons.
She recently wrapped up an internship at Groupon in Chicago where, to her surprise, she found herself among more women than men on her project team.
"It was like I was dropped into some kind of utopia," she said.
On campus, Hellesen was often reminded that she was entering a field filled predominantly with men. It's jarring, she said, being one of two women in a discussion group of 30 people or one of a handful in a computer science lecture.
But when she returned to Urbana a few weeks ago, there were more young women walking the halls of the Siebel Center, headquarters of the UI's top-ranked computer science department. Over in room 1318, where the Women in Computer Science club has stocked video games, energy bars and nail polish bottles, Emily Tran and Brianna Ifft are visibly excited about the "new girls."
This has been a bumper year as far as recruiting women to the freshmen class, said Lenny Pitt, a UI computer science professor and director of undergraduate programs.
After several years of hovering at or below 11 percent, the percentage of female undergraduates in computer science at the UI rose to 16.5 percent this fall. As a percentage of incoming computer science students this fall, women make up 24.6 percent, triple what it was two years ago.
This is the celebrated department that claims among its many successful alumni YouTube founder Jawed Karim, PayPal founder Max Levchin and former Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie. Its students are recruited by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other Silicon Valley companies. Those graduating with bachelor degrees earn an average starting salary of $85,428 (and that's based on 2012 data). It's also grown in size in recent years and has become tougher to get into.
UI computer science lecturer Cinda Heeren credits the increase in women to about 10 years of hard work by people who care about the issue. That includes people in the industry; organizations like code.org, which aims to increase participation in computer science among women and underrepresented students of color; the National Center for Women & Information Technology; and researchers who have been studying the problem.
Pitt sees several reasons for more young women in the department. First, the pool of highly qualified women nationwide has increased in part because computer science lately is being viewed more as a field where people can make a societal impact as opposed to sitting in a windowless basement staring at code, Pitt said.
Students see computer science as "touching everything." It's a way to create, communicate and solve problems, he said.
"Word is also getting out about how fun it is, how versatile it is. How there are opportunities ... to be entrepreneurial, to change the world," said Heeren, who advises many of the young women in computer science at Illinois.
Plus, job opportunities abound.
Wooing women
The UI department has seen a record number of applications ― 2,300 for this year's entering class of 341 ― and consequently, a high number of highly qualified women. With a smaller pool, the UI faced tough competition for those highly qualified students from other top CS programs, such as Stanford and MIT, Pitt said.
He also credits university staff and students for ramping up outreach and recruiting efforts. For example, they cover travel costs for recruits and hold summer camps to generally inspire interest in the field as well as recruit students. Members of Women in Computer Science often reach out to potential students, too, participating in events and writing letters to them. When recruits come to visit the department, there's always a group of enrolled female students who are all excited for others to come.
"Once they come, they don't want to leave," Pitt said.
While many come to the department straight after graduating at or near the top of their nationally ranked high schools, Hellesen took a not-so-traditional route to Illinois. The Rockford native dropped out of a high school for gifted students, earned a GED and worked in technical support for a cell phone carrier. She enrolled in a community college but had to take several remedial math classes before moving up and mastering advanced mathematical concepts. She transferred to the UI and initially majored in physics before taking CS 125, Introduction to Java programming. It was in that class she realized she had more fun writing code than studying physics.
She had to retake some computer science courses but was able to transfer in "by the skin of my teeth." She admits "it's scary to walk in a room with couple hundred people and you see only a couple people like you," but now Hellesen is comfortable at Siebel, thanks to the support system from faculty and peers.
"The best thing we can do is make CS look appealing to (young women)," she said. That means dispelling the stereotype that computer scientists spend an inordinate amount of time alone, eating pizza and drinking Mountain Dew or Red Bull, she said.
"There are vibrant, beautiful young women who create things, who make things happen with their mind and a keyboard," she said.
Building a pipeline
Traditionally, young women have not pursued degrees or sought jobs in computer science because of several issues: lack of exposure, lack of awareness, misconceptions and stereotypes, said Lecia Barker, senior research scientist with the National Center for Women & Information Technology and associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas.
"Unlike biology and chemistry, computer science (the real science, not how to use apps) is rarely taught in high school. Some good news here is that girls and boys take math at equal rates and are about equally successful. Some bad news is that they often don't know what to do with their love of math," she said.
Computer science is a perfect choice. But often, students, teachers, school districts and parents lack information about what computer science is, the number of jobs available and what people in these jobs do, she said.
"They also have misconceptions about the nature of the job, often equating computing work with 'programming,' " she said. Programming is a skill, but computer science is about more than that.
Also, there's a "cultural disconnect" between being feminine and being technical, according to Barker. And studies have shown a belief that "people like me" aren't good at something can reduce performance and interest, she said.
UI computer science students Brianna Ifft of Forrest and Emily Tran of Chicago credit their high school teachers for encouraging them to pursue computer science-related opportunities. Ifft attended Prairie Central in Fairbury and Tran went to Northside College Prep in Chicago. Both took Advanced Placement computer science courses. When Ifft completed all the computer science classes available at her high school, she enrolled in community college courses.
In high school, Ifft was introduced to the Illinois computer science department through ChicTech, an annual retreat put on by the student group Women in Computer Science. Tran is now president and Ifft is its publicity chair.
The organization matches study partners, invites guest speakers to campus, organizes field trips to companies like Google's Chicago office and tech conferences, and assembles tech teams so members develop skills outside of class projects. Members also encourage outreach to middle and high schools and have established "mentoring circles" inspired by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In" movement.
"With clubs like ours and books like Sheryl Sandberg's, all the little things add up in the CS community and make a difference," Ifft said.
Both said they have noticed more companies encouraging girls in STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math. There's Goldie Blox, building toys marketed for girls, and UI student start-up Miss Possible, which creates dolls based on historical role models like mathematician Ada Lovelace.
"Toys are changing and commercials and social media are encouraging women in STEM and to be engineers," Tran said. "It takes people to say 'I'm going to buy my daughter Legos versus Barbies' all the time. Hopefully, it's getting better," she said.
Culture changing
Of the six new tenure-track hires starting this fall in the computer science department, two are women: Ranjitha Kumar, an assistant professor with a Ph.D. from Stanford, and Tandy Warnow, a professor from the University of Texas. That brings the total number of tenure-track women in the department to 9, or 16 percent.
Kumar grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, loved solving puzzles and studied art and design in high school. Back then, her dream job was to work at Pixar in animation. Her desire to study graphic design led her to computer science at Stanford. While there, she became interested in creating support tools for web design, in human-computer interaction and big data.
It's possible more women are entering the field because of all the jobs available, just as there were during the late '90s, she acknowledged. But it's also possible they're choosing the profession because they see more women launching or leading tech companies like Pinterest and Polyvore, a social commerce site.
"It's great to see the trend everywhere that a lot of women are getting sucked back into technology and I really think it's because the culture is changing a lot," she said.
"The way to get more women in tech is to embrace the diversity that they bring to the field instead of assimilating them into the intensive hacker culture they usually perceive it having."
The 28-year-old delayed her joining the UI faculty for a year in order to work on Apropose, her Silicon Valley start-up that promises to help designers through data mining. Of its four founders, two are women.
Companies are realizing that building successful tech teams requires bringing together people with a lot of different perspectives, she said.
"I think that's why also women are getting more interested in tech. The industry is definitely realizing that you need that in order to build successful products. You have to have people with different perspectives," she said.
A long road
This fall, the UI department expanded its offerings of computer science degrees. For years, it's had a major in computer science within the College of Engineering and a few "CS +" degrees, which combine computer science with mathematics or statistics. With the new academic year, the department launched four new "CS + X" majors, which combine computer science with chemistry, astronomy, anthropology or linguistics in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
The number of students in the CS + X program is small, but Pitt expects it to grow slowly.
"These blended degrees are probably going to be more appealing to a more diverse population," he said.
The computer science department at Illinois does not have a specific gender target by which it will measure its success.
"Our target has been 'more,' " Pitt said. It would be nice to see equity but in the end, he said, they have to ask how large is the pool and the percentage of women are interested in computer science?
By building outreach programs with schools, by introducing more computing in high schools, more young women will consider the field and apply, growing that pool.
"It's a long pipeline, a long road," Pitt said. "Hopefully, we'll start seeing that change."
Move over, men
There are still far more males majoring in computer science at the University of Illinois but the gender gap is closing. Percentages are up this fall, both for undergraduate and freshman females enrolled in the highly competitive department:
Total Freshmen
Year Women Percent Women Percent
Fall 2010 95 10.57 24 9.6
Fall 2011 92 9.7 23 10.04
Fall 2012 100 9.42 21 8.27
Fall 2013 151 12.2 50 17.3
Fall 2014 234 16.53 84 24.63
By the numbers
The gender makeup of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus:
Total undergraduates: 32,579
Percentage of women undergraduates: 43.86 percent
Total graduates and professional students: 11,024
Percentage of women graduate and professional students: 46.7
Women as a percent of total students on campus: 44.57
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