$100K Prize To School Of Mines For Promoting Women In Computing

GOLDEN, CO - From Colorado School of Mines: Colorado School of Mines has been recognized by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) for its work to increase meaningful participation in computing education among women.

The Mines Department of Computer Science is the grand prize recipient of the 2019 NCWIT Extension Services Transformation (NEXT) Award, the nonprofit organization announced. Powered by NCWIT with support from a private donor, the NEXT Awards honor undergraduate academic departments who have demonstrated outstanding achievements as clients of NCWIT Extension Services, a program that helps academic computing departments develop high-impact strategies for recruiting and retaining more women students with advice that is customized to local needs and conditions.

“We are honored to receive this award in recognition of the department’s hard work to diversify our student population in computer science,” said Tracy Camp, professor and head of the Computer Science Department at Mines. “We look forward to building on our success and continuing to do our part in encouraging underrepresented groups to pursue technology-related degrees.”

Women earned 57 percent of all undergraduate degrees in the U.S. in 2016, but earned less than one-fifth of all computer and information sciences undergraduate degrees (www.ncwit.org/bythenumbers). Academic departments can change the gender imbalance of their student body through deliberate efforts directed at the local system that creates and maintains gender imbalance.

At Mines, Computer Science has only been an independent academic department since 2016, and its faculty, led by Dr. Camp, are already making significant in-roads in the recruitment and retention of women. Signature initiatives include the women-led K-12 outreach program DECtech, industry partnership program C-MAPP, CS+X degree flexibility and U-CLIMB, a near-peer mentoring program where undergraduate teaching assistants are trained to be inclusive of all students.

The results are evident in the numbers – the number of women majoring in CS has more than quintupled in 10 years, at the same time as the department has seen overall enrollment more than triple (from 157 students to 540 students). Women students are sticking around, too – the department’s attrition rate is now the same for men and women at 2.5 percent (compared to 12 percent for women in 2012).

As the Grand Prize recipient, CS@Mines will receive $100,000, with part of that funding to be used to create inclusive and welcoming gathering spaces for CS students. Past winners include the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of California, Irvine; and University of Washington.

“Not only are we proud to recognize these departments for their remarkable results, but we’re also proud to recognize the ripple effect these institutions create among the computing community at large,” said NCWIT CEO and co-founder Lucy Sanders. “They are setting an example for other institutions – reinventing their culture by establishing better habits and practices for attracting and keeping a range of students in their computing programs.”