Abstract
This chapter provides an introduction to the two main sections of this book. The first section of the book provides a summary of the historical and social science literature about the history of higher education – and science, technology, and computing education in particular – for women, African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians in the United States. The second section provides case studies of organizations interested in broadening participation in the science and technology disciplines in general and in computing in particular; as well as case studies about college and university departments of computer science and engineering that have had success in attracting, retaining, and advancing women in engineering and computing careers. The chapter discusses overarching themes that run through the book: exogenous forces (war, civil rights, reverse discrimination, and IT workforce needs); the conceptualization of the underrepresentation problem in terms of a pipeline instead of a pathway; solutions that involve fixing people contrasted with those that involve fixing the system; the role of nonprofit organizations and individual change agents in broadening participation in computing; and the issues surrounding intersectionality, i.e. cases in which someone belongs to two or more underrepresented groups such as being both female and African American.
Keywords
- Social Science Literature
- Underrepresented Minority
- Underrepresented Group
- Exogenous Force
- Computing Education
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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- 1.
This book employs the contemporary policy language when it speaks of “underrepresented minorities” instead of the term “race”, which is more commonly used by historians. Race is, of course, a social construct. At one time in American history, Jews, the Irish, and Eastern Europeans were segregated from Whites as separate racial groups, but today they are all considered as Whites. African Americans, however, have historically been racially segregated throughout American history and continue to be segregated today. Not all minorities are underrepresented in the computing field. For example, Asians from India, China, and Korea are over-represented in computing in the United States. Other Asians, such as the Hmong and Vietnamese, are underrepresented.
- 2.
The numbers about representation of women in traditional scientific and computing occupations may tell only part of the story. For example, the treatment of the ENIAC women at the time – and in many historical treatments since then – has treated these women mostly as assistants in a way that undervalued their scientific contributions. Similarly, occupational classifications over time may not count the large numbers of women in the data processing industry as information workers. See, for example, Light (1999), Grier (2005) and Misa (2010).
- 3.
This paragraph is copied almost verbatim from the introduction to the author’s companion book, Participation in Computing: The National Science Foundation’s Expansionary Programs.
- 4.
There were other important pieces of federal legislation as well, e.g. the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was used as a tool to open university admission to African Americans and other racial minorities, and the Title IX Education Amendments of 1972, which had the effect of enabling much higher female admission in higher education programs in the STEM and medical fields.
- 5.
Another barrier for Hispanic women in 1970 was that most engineering schools did not admit women (of any race) or only admitted a very few, typically representing well under 10 % of the student population.
- 6.
We make no claim to have been exhaustive in the list of STEM broadening participation organization. We list in the main body of the text only those that we profile later in the book. For example, the National Society of Black Physicists was created in 1977 and is not discussed here. There may well have been additional organizations of this type.
- 7.
See, for example, the analysis in Freeman and Aspray (1999) or the federal occupational categories related to computing at http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/home.htm
- 8.
Two years earlier, Carol Muller (the founder of MentorNet) and Susan Metz (a co-founder of WEPAN ) had written an editorial calling for an abandonment of the pipeline metaphor and renewed focus on multiple entry points into STEM careers. (Muller and Metz 2002)
- 9.
Evelynn Hammonds has also pointed out another problem of the pipeline metaphor: it led policymakers for a number of years to the mistaken belief that “the factors leading to the production of white male scientists were the same ones that lead to the production of women and minority scientists.” (Personal communication to the author, 18 March 2016)
- 10.
It is an unexplored question which computing occupations are open to people who take these informal pathways, and which kinds of employers are willing to hire people with an informal computing education; but it is clear that this informal education opens up some computing occupations with some employers.
- 11.
There are, of course, many more individual change agents than I can mention here. It has been a highlight of this author’s career to get to know many of these people and watch them in action.
- 12.
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Aspray, W. (2016). Introduction. In: Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Computing. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24811-0_1
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