Although Maria Klawe and Nancy Leveson have been active in many ways in recruiting and retaining women in CSE, their selection for this joint award recognizes their role as founding co-chairs of the highly successful CRA-W Committee. Klawe and Leveson provided the enthusiasm, shared vision, and commitment that forged CRA-W into the cohesive and productive group that it remains. Since its founding in 1991, CRA-W has led efforts at the national level to increase the representation of women in computing research, running programs that have involved more than 2,000 participants! After founding CRA-W, Klawe and Leveson continued to support its activities, each serving on the Steering Committee for many years. Both of them participated in numerous CRA-W workshops.

In particular, under the direction of Klawe and Leveson as co-chairs and later as members, they:

• Established the CRA-W committee as an action-based committee, a tradition that continues to this day. Each committee member is responsible for a project.
• Initiated brainstorming sessions seeking to craft projects that could positively impact CSE women at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels.
• Led the brain storming discussions and often initiated the projects and drafted volunteers to lead them.
• Secured NSF funding to support the committee activities, the first of such funding from NSF.

Many of the initial CRA-W projects developed under their leadership continue to thrive today, including:

• Systers-academia (a moderated mailing list for women graduate students and faculty in CSE.
• Career Mentoring Workshop (first held in 1993—brings together graduate students and new PhDs with senior researchers to develop career strategies).
• "Expanding the Pipeline" column in CRN (that reports through a regular column in CRN, on projects and issues relevant to underrepresented groups).
• Distributed Mentoring Project (initiated in 1994 with NSF funding that brings together CSE undergraduates and professors for a research summer at the mentor's institution).

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