 My name is Liza Mundy. I am a program director at the New America Foundation, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank located here in Washington, D.C. that is devoted to the incubation of big ideas and new ideas in any number of domains. This particular event on Pathways to Success for Women and STEM is a joint collaboration of our Future Tents program, which is an adjoint initiative between Slate, which as I'm sure you know is an online magazine, New America and Arizona State University. The program looks at emerging technologies and their impact on policy and culture. There's a whole group of articles that have been published on Slate in the Future Tents logo that you can read. You might have read them already. You can certainly read them afterwards and there will be also a piece of writing that summarizes the insights of this event. The other program that is sponsoring this is my program, which we're calling Bread Winning and Caregiving. It's our work and family program at New America. It's dedicated to the proposition that men and women alike are now caregivers and breadwinners and we need to find new ways to create a society that enables both men and women to do these essential human functions to the best of their abilities. Women's leadership is a big part of this agenda for our program and one of the functions our program does is to convene events like this to create spaces where an incredibly distinguished panel of experts can share their insights and experiences in a way that will educate all of us that we can take out of these rooms and use to amplify and inform our own work. I would argue that 2013 was a good year for women's leadership. We had Janet Yellen nominated as the first female chair of the Federal Reserve. She's now in that office. We had Mary Bara as the first female executive of a big three automaker. In my field of journalism we have Nancy Gibbs as the first top editor of Time Magazine, which is our nation's iconic news weekly. For several years we've had a woman Jill Abramson as the executive editor of the New York Times, which is also a big advancement and I think in the past year sort of less notice has been the fact that in part as a result of that the Masthead of the New York Times, the top editors at the paper are now half female and so I think that shows what happens when you have women at the top and certainly what we hope will happen. So I think it's important I think to take stock even as I'm sure everybody in this room is dedicated to women's progress in the STEM fields and to pushing for more progress and more advances. So it is important to take stock of our achievements and of where we've come and at the same time what we're trying to do is identify what are the remaining barriers and challenges, particularly in fields that have been sticky, that have been tough. A couple of weeks ago we did a similar event looking at women in politics, which is also a field where women have made progress. We have 20 women in the U.S. Senate that's more than ever but it's still just 20%. We looked in particular at the state of New Hampshire, which is a state that for a number of reasons has all women and all female congressional delegation and women in all its top offices. So we tried to look at what are the ingredients in a state like New Hampshire that have led to success for women? Why are there other states where women's progress has not been nearly so pronounced? We're trying to do the same thing in fields like STEM to look at what are the formulas for success? What are the barriers to women's success and how is the landscape changing? Our keynote, we have an incredibly distinguished roster of speakers. I'm so grateful to all of you and our moderators for making the trip to DuPont Circle on a day that's not quite as warm and sunny as we would have hoped. We're gonna introduce the panelists with each panel instead of my introducing everybody at once. But I am gonna introduce our keynote speaker, Maria Clave, who we'll talk about. She's the president of Harvey Mudd, and I would say that in some ways, Harvey Mudd is the New Hampshire of the STEM field. She's done an extraordinary job of attracting, mentoring women students and women faculty there, and I think following them into the field and their professions and staying in touch with them as they move into the work world. Ironically enough, I interviewed Maria Clave. I was working on a piece about failure. There is a considerable body of work now that shows that being willing to court failure, to risk failure, to tolerate failure, and to weather failure is an important part of learning and succeeding. There's a new book out called The Upside of Down by a New America fellow, Megan McCartle, making this argument, other psychologists have made it as well. I interviewed Maria Clave, who is a leader who is willing, I think unusually willing, to talk about her own perceived failures and challenges as a leader, as a way of creating an environment where students understand that it's okay to talk about these things, and it's okay to experience setbacks and failures, and to provide them with the mechanisms and the support systems that they need to cope with the sorts of setbacks that are inevitable in a tough environment like science and STEM. So just to give you a little bit of her CV, she is a renowned mathematician, computer scientist, and scholar. She is the first woman to lead Harvey Mudd College since its founding in 1955. Prior to joining Harvey Mudd, she served as dean of engineering and professor of computer science at Princeton University. Based on our interview, I can say she's a lifelong runner and a watercolor artist who has been known to paint in meetings to slow herself down. She, Harvey Mudd has, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but close to half of the students are female. She, when she took over, there had been a decline in the number of women in computer science, and that percentage is now up to 40%. She is now on Fortune's list of the world's greatest leaders, and so we are incredibly honored and thrilled to welcome Maria Claving. So I'm wearing my T-shirt. Harvey Mudd has just entered its first public fundraising campaign in 20 years, and the slogan is, Harvey Mudd is on a mission. And I just thought I would wear my campaign T-shirt for this wonderful event. So I'm really delighted to be here and delighted to talk briefly about what has happened at Mudd. Now, I'm sitting at a table with a couple of really renowned leaders from MIT, and I will say that MIT was so much further ahead of Harvey Mudd in terms of really getting the numbers of undergraduate students to be roughly 50-50, which they did, I believe, in the 90s, approximately. So I arrived at Mudd as president in end of June 2006. We were about 32% female in our student body, which was up from about 22% a decade earlier. We were about 32% female on our faculty, which is quite spectacular for a science and engineering school. Now, okay, raise your hand if you never had heard of Harvey Mudd before right now. Okay, thank you for being so honest. So Harvey Mudd is one of the Claremont Colleges. Claremont Colleges are in Claremont, not surprisingly, about 45 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. There are five undergraduate colleges, some of which you might actually have heard of, Pomona, Scripps, Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Harvey Mudd. We are the science and engineering college, and one of my goals as president, and I'm gonna stay as president for a very long time because it could take me a long time to achieve this, is that anyone who's ever heard of Caltech and MIT should have heard of Harvey Mudd because we are the place that really specializes in undergraduate science and engineering education. And I will tell you, in spite of sitting at a table with folks from other institutions, that we are the best undergraduate science and engineering education on the face of the earth. Okay, so we are now close to 50-50 male and female and the undergraduate, well, we're undergraduate only, so are in our student body. We're probably about 47% female right now. In our engineering seniors this year, they are 54% female. Computer science has mentioned it was about 10% female when I arrived, it's now about 40% female. It was in our junior year, we've gone up to, I think in our just CS major we're about 48% female. So why is this important? From my perspective, there are three reasons why it matters to get more underrepresented groups into computer science. And the first one is there's more jobs than people. The demand for computer science bachelor's degree, college level hires is just incredible. Salaries start at about 90K. By the time you've been out maybe 10 years, you might be earning 300K, which is more than most university faculty earn. So great jobs, big demand. Second one is they're great jobs if you wanna combine a career with a family. And when I was pregnant my first time, I had never met a single person who didn't stay at home with their children. I mean, I never met a woman who actually continued working. And I was determined that I was gonna do it. And everyone was saying to me, you'll understand once you have your baby, you'll want to stay home too. And I'm going, no. I work in theoretical computer science. This is a fast moving field. If I stay home for four weeks, I'll miss something. Of course I did stay home for four weeks. But I did go right back to work. And I'm very lucky that I've had a husband throughout my life who's been really an equal partner in taking care of our kids and doing everything. In fact, as I went into more and more senior leadership positions, he took on more and more of what needed to be done to the extent that my daughter here in DC a few years ago brought me to tears by telling me that I never came to any of her kindergarten things or her softball games. So I'm going, Sasha, I did, I did. And she said, no, no. Dad did everything. I'm going like, okay. So second reason that I'd like to see more women in computer science is because they're jobs that pay well and they're jobs that offer a lot of flexibility. And those are the two things that are really important. If you do wanna have kids and have an ambitious career, well, that plus having the ideal partner like my husband. And then the third reason, which is the most important of all is every single problem that faces society today, whether we're talking about healthcare or poverty or anything else, education, is going to involve computing technology as part of the solution. It won't only involve it. There'll be lots of other disciplines, but we need more biologists who have a computer science background, many more doctors who have a computer science background, many more politicians who have a computer science background and on and on and on. And if the only people who are working on those problems are white and Asian males, I'm sorry, we will not get the right kinds of solutions that our world needs. We need diverse people with different backgrounds to come at it. So I'm just gonna very, very, very briefly tell you what Harvey Mudd College did to radically increase the number of women and also African-Americans and Hispanic students majoring in computer science. And in fact, not just that, but we tripled the number of CS majors. So we have more computer science majors than engineering majors, which is really very bizarre. Not only that, we have students from all the other Claremont colleges deciding to major in computer science at Mudd because that's one of the things you can do at the Claremont colleges as you can take courses at other colleges. So what did they do? Let me start by telling you why young women do not want to major in computer science. There are three reasons. Number one, it's boring. Number two, all those computer science guys are geeky guys with no life and I don't wanna hang out with them. And number three is, well, I wouldn't be good at it anyway. So if you want to change that, all you have to do is, you have to make it really fun and really interesting. You have to make it clear to young women that there are lots of really cool young women and older women, women of all ages who love tech careers. And then number three is, you have to take away the intimidation factor. You have to make it, you have to make courses. They're still gonna be just as rigorous, just as challenging, but they're gonna be fun and they're not gonna be scary. So that's exactly what RCS department did. Now, they took it from a course that was learn to program in Java and changed it to same material essentially, same concepts, but changed it to create a problem solving using computational approaches with Python. Okay, raise your hand if you do not want to be known as creative. Okay, well, I haven't met many people in my life who don't want to be creative either. Create a problem solving. I mean, young women love problem solving. They love puzzles. We took out the intimidation factor by streaming the course so that we have CS5 gold. You can probably tell my colors are colors are black and gold and white. CS5 gold is for the people with no prior experience in computing. CS5 black is for people with a fair amount of prior experience in computing. CS42 is a combination of the first two courses for people with way too much experience in computing. But on top of that, there's almost always, I'm gonna ask Ed to come up here for a second. Okay, so Ed is the geeky guy in my intro CS class. And Ed has been programming since he was five years old. And Ed, yes, Ed is just, you know, like he's so happy to be in my class because he's finally getting to talk to a real computer scientist. And so he keeps on asking questions and making comments and all the other students in the class are going like, oh my God, maybe everybody knows as much as him. Oh my God, I'll never pass this course. So what we do is we take our students like Ed, they're almost always male. We take our students like Ed, that's why I picked on him. And we say, Ed, I love having you in my class. This is a one-on-one conversation outside the classroom. You know, you know so much, you're so passionate about it. You're one of the best students I've ever taught. I'm sure you don't know that some of the other students are really freaked out by how much you know. So if we could just have this conversation, our conversations about computer science and private, that would be great. Is that okay with you? It works. Thanks, Ed. Okay, so the final part of the solution was that we take a certain number of our students, female students, 25 of our first-year female students to Hopper. Now we only have about 100 first-year female students because we have about 200 first-year students every year. So we take a significant number of them to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. It's in Phoenix, which I believe is in Arizona. October 2nd through 5th, be about 4,000 women and about 75 men. It's an amazing experience. It's so exuberant and passionate. There's dancing, there's swag. It's amazing the impact of swag on young women. And they come back and they go like, yeah, there are women who do tech stuff. Lots of them, 4,000 of them. So with those three things, in three years, we went from being 10% female to about 40% female in computer science. It's not that the first course or the Hopper Conference persuaded them to be a CS major. They just persuaded them to take one more course. By the time they're in their third course, they're just going, wow, great jobs out there. And this is really fun. I suppose I could be a CS major. So that's the story of how Harvey Mudd has changed. I'll also say, one of the things that I love about Harvey Mudd is we have a lot of female faculty as well. Up until last year, there had never been a female chair of one of the science or engineering departments. We only have seven departments. Next year, we will have four of the department chairs or female, which is really pretty awesome. So thank you very much.