Andrew Moore, Dean of SCS, from the recent Geekwire HQ2 series:
GW: One of the major triumphs of your computer science department over the past couple years is the gender equity that you’re seeing in your incoming classes. It’s remarkable. And it’s not something that’s happening elsewhere. How have you done it, and what can the rest of not only academia, but technology, learn from what you’ve done here?
Moore: The first thing is you’ve got to begin two decades ago. That’s a really hard thing for folks who want to see that recipe. But of course, I believe that folks can do it more quickly. The first thing not to do is try to make the curriculum “pink” in any way, if you see what I mean. And the faculty and the leaders around this were very clear on that. It is very important to have those connections with middle schools and high schools, where all we have to do there is say what we really believe, which is that computer science is problem solving. Computer science is not semicolons and curly braces. And I think that really helps.
But then, here was the inspiring piece. After a while it seems to become a self-reinforcing flywheel. It’s self-reinforcing in the sense that once we were 50 percent more women than the national average, we were a very attractive and interesting place for women to come to. And once that took us up to 75 percent, that was even more so. And now I think we’ve hit the optimal situation here, where it is a really good environment, where no one feels, at least gender-wise, no one feels like they’re the only one in the class or in a small minority within the class. And that was really good news.