Computing occupations increasingly dominate the workforce, but the discipline fails to attract sufficient and diverse students (i.e., women, underrepresented minorities) to meet workforce needs. To address this issue, LIGHTHOUSE projects provide computer science instructors with professional development MOOCs to recruit and retain more and diverse students in computing. We present how a professional development MOOC has been designed with relevant instructional design principles and theories to suit community college computer science instructors' learning needs. In this paper we share results from a needs assessment survey that, along with the relevant instructional theories and design principles, guided the design of an innovative diversity-focused online professional development learning environment.

The goal of this panel is to engage the computing education community in perspectives on developing and delivering diversity-focused faculty professional development. Panel session attendees will gain an understanding of the role and importance of diversity-focused professional development and knowledge about the critical instructional components that affect successful online and face-to-face professional development available to them and their colleagues. The panel is comprised of scholars who are both researchers and educators. They provide a range of experience developing and delivering professional development to high school, community college, undergraduate and graduate school computing faculty.

Work/family conflict is often cited as a concern for attracting and retaining talent in professional careers. STEM careers have been noted as particularly discouraging to professionals, especially women, for work/family concerns among other reasons. However, little research has explored the work/family attitudes of prospective professionals in these careers. This paper explores the work/family attitudes of graduate students in computing. Based on data from the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) 2011-12 nationwide survey of 1286 computing graduate students, our analysis explores at the aggregate and by sex, the connections between graduate computing education, work/family issues, and career expectations. The analysis of the data reveals work/family issues are important to those in advanced education planning careers in the field. Computing graduate students are strongly influenced by work/family issues in their decision-making regarding advanced computing education. Graduate computing students report high levels of knowledge of work/life strategies and express confidence about their abilities, and their likelihood, for balancing work and family. These findings should help graduate educators and prospective employers concerned with diversity understand the work/family concerns of computing students and future computing professionals.

Volunteer computing is a form of citizen science that has a significant gender imbalance. Far fewer women than men participate; women are typically less than ten percent of a project's participants. To better understand the experience of women in volunteer computing and seek clues as to methods for using volunteer computing experience as a recruiting tool, we analyze participant survey data from a project that tries to engage new communities with an interactive infrastructure. Our results showed very few gender differences among the responding men and women in volunteer computing. Our findings add to evidence that men and women engaged in computing activities are overwhelmingly similar. The challenge for gender balance seems to be informing and engaging larger networks of diverse women to promote volunteer computing and contribute to achieving its goals.

Volunteer Computing (VC) uses the computational resources of volunteers with Internet-connected personal computers to address fundamental problems in science. Docking Home (D@H) is a VC project targeting drug discovery through high throughput docking simulations i.e., by docking small molecules (ligands) into target proteins associated to diseases. Currently there are more than 27,000 volunteers (and 70,000 computers) worldwide supporting D@H. Similar to national trends in STEM fields, in general, the huge majority of volunteers engaged in VC projects, and in D@H in particular, are Caucasian males. This paper aims to characterize the current VC community supporting D@H and uses the information to define strategies that can help attract and retain female and ethnic minority volunteers.

Women of all colors are underrepresented in most technical disciplines. For example, electrical engineering college graduates have comprised only about ten percent women for many years, and computing graduates only about eighteen percent women, down from about thirty-five percent in the mid-1980s. Gender stereotypes and stereotypes about creators of technology contribute to this underrepresentation. Nevertheless, these prevailing conditions can be overcome to a substantial degree by actively recruiting diverse female students. This panel session will provide an introduction to the reasons for active recruiting, methods for successful active recruiting, examples of effective applications of the recommended methods, and resources to help participants as they attempt to actively recruit underrepresented students to their courses. The panel's focus will be on computing disciplines, but the information applies to other technical disciplines as well.

This paper reports on self-rated career management knowledge, use, and confidence for women in computer science and engineering before and after participating in a CRA-W Cohort of Associate Professors Project (CAPP) professional development workshop. We find that months after their workshop, three years worth of participating women gave higher ratings for their knowledge and use of skills such as time management, networking, and productive mentoring relationships, as well as confidence in their promotability. These findings suggest that professional development interventions can have long lasting positive effects on mid-career women in computing, and that the type of group mentoring, role models, and community offered by CAPP can help compensate for women's reduced access to career mentoring.

Four research-supported teaching methods can make your computing courses more effective through improved student learning, comprehension, and motivation.

This mini-workshop will follow a “train-the-trainer” model. Experts will provide guidance and resources for college computing faculty who wish to organize workshops for high school computer science teachers. These workshops will enable the teachers to attract more and diverse students to their computer science classes, which will add to the college-bound population of students prepared for and interested in a computing major.

An effective workshop has been developed for promoting a positive impact on high school teachers' recruitment of students, particularly women and minority students, into their CS classes. All past workshop attendees indicate they now are actively try to recruit girls and minority students into their computing classes and are successful in doing so.

Stereotypes about women's place among creators of technology still exist. As a result, women engineers and computer scientists must find ways to manage the conflict between their identities as women and as creators of technology. Many women manage the conflict by hiding or denying their feminine identity. We found that this strategy becomes particularly evident when discussing experiences of sexism. Focus groups with women graduate students identified many instances of sexism, but found that women tended to deny or ignore the sexism. Because sexism communicates the view that women do not fit in the culture of computing, it increases the difficulty of combining a feminine gender identity with a technical identity. Many women try to meet this challenge by minimizing their femininity, or acting like one of the guys. These coping strategies may be effective for enabling individual persistence, but they permit persistence of an inhospitable environment. Adopting practices known to reduce the incidence of sexism and mitigate its negative impact could help retain women graduate students in computing.

No abstract available.

Using longitudinal survey data from women in the CRA-W Graduate Cohort program, we measured the prevalence of observed or experienced sexism and its impact on departure from Computer Science and Computer Engineering (CSE) doctoral programs. Our data suggest that sexist behavior is perceived less often by these women than it is by women in general. In addition, few of the women who observe sexism are motivated by it to think of leaving their CSE doctoral programs. Nevertheless, when their reason for thinking of leaving is due to sexism they observed or experienced, the odds of women actually departing are at least 21 times greater than if they thought of leaving for any other reason.

The research reported here confirms and deepens our understanding of factors that affect women's confidence in their ability to complete a computer science or computer engineering (CSE) doctoral degree. Analysis of data from a longitudinal study of women participating in the Computing Research Association's Graduate Cohort for Women identifies the conditions or experiences that women perceive as influential. More importantly, we found that women who are not confident in their ability to complete their programs are about four times more likely to think about leaving CSE than those who begin confidently.

This paper highlights several viewpoints concerning a small regional conference for women in computing, which is modeled after the successful and well-known Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The viewpoints include rationale for the conference, descriptions of the celebration that provide a snapshot which captures the ease of organizing a similar event at other regional sites, additional sources for finding complete information (including a detailed how-to manual) and an account of the assessment of two recent regional celebrations performed by senior researchers at the National Center of Women and Information Technology (NCWIT).

This investigation of gendered experiences in computer science and computer engineering (CSE) doctoral programs uses survey data from a nationwide stratified random sample. Analyses of data from 41 departments show that women CSE doctoral students have less confidence than men students that they can achieve their educational goals. Moreover, women's confidence is significantly affected by their comfort asking questions in class, which is in turn affected by faculty beliefs about the relationship between diversity and student quality. Program rank also has a negative effect on confidence, but affects men and women similarly.

This special session will provide an overview of the programs that ACM's executive committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W) coordinates for the recruitment and retention of women in computing. The overview will include projects in all areas of ACM-W with special focus on those projects impacting the educational environment.

No abstract available.

Women's under-representation in academic computer science is described for the U.S. and internationally. Conditions that contribute to this situation are identified, and motivations for increasing women's participation in computer science are discussed According to recent research in the US., effective interventions at the undergraduate level include: actively recruiting women, encouraging women to persist, and mentoring for the purpose of overcoming under-representation. The latter two practices are easily implemented.

The rapid growth of computer science in both academia and industry creates a special problem with faculty turnover. This paper examines data from a national study of computer science departments to describe the circumstances surrounding faculty turnover in computer science and identify the major factors related to faculty departure. It concludes with suggested approaches for addressing the situation.

Common departmental characteristics and practices in computer science and biology/life science are compared for 46 departments at 23 Virginia colleges and universities. The goal of this preliminary investigation is to provide additional evidence on how departmental factors can affect the retention of female students.

Departmental attrition data from one state show that the difference between male and female rates of undergraduate attrition from computer science varies by institution. This analysis suggests that departmental factors are important in attrition from CS. Some CS departments inhibit female persistence at the undergraduate level while other departments promote persistence. The observed variation encourages research that compares departmental characteristics such as structure and culture, and relates them to departmental outcomes. Shifting the research focus to departmental characteristics and outcomes will identify effective methods for retaining women.