Women's science contributions celebrated

By Anita Borg, Adele Howe and Mary Jane Irwin

On Dec. 13-15, 1995, more than 700 scientists and engineers attended the Women and Science: Celebrating Achievements, Charting Challenges conference, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The stated goal of the conference was to be "outcomes oriented--fostering the exchange of information and spurring attendees to action at their home institutions. Out of the celebration of achievements will come new ideas for meeting challenges to the full participation of all in the future science and engineering work force."

This article notes conference highlights but focuses on sessions organized by NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. The authors of this article participated in these sessions; Anita Borg of Digital Equipment Corp. presented recommendations from the technology session to the plenary meeting. Information about the overall conference structure with bios of plenary keynote speakers can be found at http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/conferences/women95.htm.

The conference began on Wednesday evening with a video welcome by Hillary Rodham Clinton and an inspiring keynote address by France A. Cordova, NASA's chief scientist. We also heard from Lynda Jordan and Lydia Villa-Komaroff, who were featured in the PBS "Discovering Women" series. All represented wonderful contradictions of the cultural stereotypes of the successful scientist.

After Thursday morning talks by Linda Wilson, president of Radcliffe College, and Anne Petersen, NSF's deputy director, the day was divided into two sets of breakout sessions. In the morning, discipline-based groups organized by each NSF directorate asked the question, "Where are we now?" In the afternoon, cross-disciplinary groups asked, "What are the new directions?"

CISE organized its morning session around efforts to recognize women's achievements and to attract and retain women in computer science and engineering. Projects of the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Research (CRAW) were very prominent. Borg delivered the keynote "Celebrating Achievements by Women in CS & CE." The talk described the successes of the 1994 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the goals of the 1997 GHC. Borg then proposed a challenge and a new initiative to meet it.

The challenge is to increase the percentage of new scientists and engineers who are female to 50% by 2010. Borg said she believes the challenge can be met through strong corporate support and intensive use of the Internet to connect and inform those working toward the goal.

Fran Allen, an IBM Fellow and CRA Board member, responded: "What Anita is proposing is extraordinarily important for us in industry. My first reaction was, we can't do it. My second is that we must do it. My third was that we absolutely can do it, by starting with the young girls and using the technology."

Following the keynote, Mary Jane Irwin of Pennsylvania State University, Joan Feigenbaum of AT&T, Fran Berman of the University of California at San Diego and Joe O'Rourke of Smith College--all CRAW members--described both the alarming downward trend in female participation in computing and the exciting efforts of the CRAW committee. These efforts include the database of women Ph.D. recipients, mentoring workshops and the CRA Distributed Mentoring Project. [See the September 1994, May 1995 and September 1995 issues of CRN, respectively.]

Computer science and engineering was the only discipline represented at the conference that is suffering a downward trend in participation.

The afternoon session, "The Impact of Technology," included reports on a number of technical projects women ran or participated in, or that were relevant to women. A common thread among these very different projects was their integration of traditional technical endeavors with other fields or their use of unusual approaches to the technical aspect of the project.

• Tom Defanti and Maxine Brown's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (University of Illinois at Chicago) brings together technologists and artists to create virtual-reality and virtual-prototyping instrumentation for viewing scientific and engineering data.
• Judith Klavans' Digital Libraries project (Columbia University) is a collaboration between computer scientists and librarians fostered in part by creating an organization outside of the normal academic departments.
• Nancy Leveson's work in software safety (University of Washington) bridges many gaps among CS interface designers, domain experts, risk assessors and psychologists to develop a systems theory that looks at whole systems with the goal of understanding how they can be made safe.
• Borg's work on Mecca, an interorganizational group communication system, unites 2,100 women in computing in 24 countries in an information-rich virtual community.
• Cynthia Lanius described her participation in GirlTECH (Rice University), a program to train teachers to teach technology to girls. Engineers and teachers worked together to build teaching strategies, use online resources, design lessons that use technology and explore representation issues.
• Cheris Kramarae is involved in the Women, Information Technology and Scholarship program (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) that tries to increase female involvement in campus decisions. The group is noted for collecting and disseminating information about gender issues in information technology.

In both the morning and afternoon sessions, discussion among audience members was lively and contributed significantly to our effort to recommend policies to NSF. Based on Adele Howe's great record of the sessions, she, Borg and O'Rourke assembled a set of five recommendations.

Friday morning's plenary session began with an introduction by Luther Williams, head of NSF's Education and Human Resources Directorate, and an extraordinary talk by Shirley Malcom, who heads Education and Human Resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the president's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology. These were followed by presentations by the reporter from each of Thursday's afternoon sessions.

Borg began by putting the question, "How do we get there?" in context. The first question to answer is, "Where do we want to go?" She repeated her earlier challenge, suggesting that the conference mantra be "50/50 by 2010." In this context, she made the following points and recommendations:

1. Computing suffers from a serious gender-ratio crisis. The repercussions may be felt far beyond the computing field. An early rejection of computing may be as devastating to a girl's future prospects in science as is a rejection of mathematics. We urge NSF to continue significant funding to address this.
2. All ages and all levels present challenges to gender-ratio equity. We lose girls and women to science and engineering at every stage in the pipeline. We recommend increased funding for programs such as GirlTECH for K-12; merit awards for women and mentoring toward graduate school for undergraduate women; mentoring, networking and fellowships for graduate women; and visiting professorships for faculty and professional women.
3. Projects that bridge the boundaries between computing and other disciplines create conditions ripe for drawing women into computing. We recommend that interdisciplinary work be highly valued in funding decisions.
4. Projects with relevance to reality seem to attract women. Science and technology education should be firmly grounded and connected to real-world examples showing their relevance and worth. Funding criteria should value projects that make a solid connection to real-world problems.
5. The information revolution embodied by the Internet presents a risky opportunity. We are at a fork in the road. We can follow a path to disenfranchisement and social stratification, or we can use the technology to reduce isolation and increase the level of scientific education for all citizens. NSF should take this into account when evaluating programs.

We hope NSF's directorates will continue their commitment to increasing the participation of women in science and engineering and will foster the collaborations of industry, academia and government to actively use information technology to this end.

Anita Borg is a consultant engineer at Digital Equipment Corp.

Adele Howe is an assistant professor of computer science at Colorado State University.

Mary Jane Irwin is a professor of computer science and engineering at Pennsylvania State University.