 My name is Maria Clavé. I'm the president of Harvey Mike College in Claremont, California. I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but I'm delighted to be able to talk with you by video. I'm going to be telling you a little bit about what our Computer Science Department did to dramatically increase the number of women majoring in computer science at Harvey Mike College. When I arrived nine years ago, the number of women are each year graduating with a computer science major was between one and three. Which was about 10% of the number of people in our computer science major. And I'm very happy to say that after about four years that number had dramatically increased so that the number of women graduating were about 40% of our CS major. And in fact in the last couple of years the number of women graduating has been about 30 rather than one to three. The things that our department did were relatively straightforward. They were not particularly difficult or expensive. And the reason I want to tell you about them is in the hope that many other universities and colleges will be interested in trying some of their techniques at their own institutions. So very briefly what our department did was it did three things. It changed our introductory course to make it less intimidating and more attractive and interesting. It offered to take first-year female students to the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing each fall and it offered research experiences to a smaller number of students, female students between their first and their second year. So let me talk in a little bit more detail about specifically what the department did. So one thing you should know is that every student at Harvey Mudd has to take a computer science course in their first semester. They also have to take math, physics, and chemistry and a writing course and many other things. So it's not unusual that they're taking a computer science course. But the course we were teaching, which was a pretty standard introduction to computer science, was framed by the students as learning to program in Java. Now of course it actually taught a lot more than just how to program in Java. It taught a lot about the basic concept in computer science. But the students thought of it as learning to program in Java and it was one of the least liked required courses that students had to take in their first semester. When our faculty revised the course, they very deliberately framed it as creative problem-solving using computational approaches in Python. Now Python like Java is a very popular programming language in industry, but unlike Java it's relatively easy to learn. Now the other part of that was creative problem-solving. Pretty much all of the young women that I know would love to be seen as a creative problem solver. Most of the young men too. And so talking about it being creative problem-solving made it much more attractive. And in fact in teaching the same concepts that were in the old course, our faculty made a special effort to teach the concepts around how those concepts were a tool in solving a real-world problem. And the homework assignments also offered the opportunity for students to apply their knowledge to real-world problems. Now the other thing that our faculty did was they addressed something that I will call the intimidation problem. So one of the things that commonly happens in your first computer science course is there are one or two people in the course who seem to know almost as much as the instructor. They're always answering questions and asking questions and the questions that they ask and answer are talking about things that most of the other students in the room don't have a clue about. And it's very scary for the other students because the other students just especially the young women assume that oh everybody else in the class knows all of this stuff. I really don't belong here. I'll never be able to compete with people who know so much. And so one of the things our instructors did was to talk to these individuals, almost always boys, and say, Joe, I love having you in my class. You're a great student. I love how passionate you are about computer science. But you probably don't realize that some of the other students in the class are feeling quite intimidated by how much you know. Let's take our conversations offline. Let's have them one-on-one, perhaps in office hours. And Joe and the other young men in the class who knew so much are always happy to have those conversations out of class if you ask them nicely about it. The other thing our faculty did was to divide the course into two sections. Our colors are gold and black. One section is called CS5 Gold. That's for the people who know pretty much nothing about computer science when they arrive at Harvey Mudd. The other one is CS5 Black, which is for the students who have perhaps taken one year of computer science in high school. Now we always have a few students who have taken way too much computer science to be in CS5 at all. And so we put them in a separate section called CS42, which covers the first two computer science courses in our sequence. Now in addition to making this course be about creative problem solving using computational approaches, we also emphasize a lot of teamwork because we know that when you're learning to program for the first time, it can be quite frustrating and lonely. And by having people work together using a technique called pair programming, we found that both males and females enjoyed the course a lot more. Now let me talk a little bit about taking students to Hopper. Hopper is held every fall. It moves around the country in the U.S. They have also been coding some versions of Hopper in India and I believe in Britain. And we also have some regional versions that move around the United States. The general idea is it brings together several thousand, last fall it was eight thousand, several thousand women and a few men to talk about careers in technology, new kinds of research, career advice, just a wide variety of things. But it's a very exuberant, exciting experience. So if you haven't been to a Hopper yet, you should try to get to go to one. It's really very exciting. And what we found was that for our first year female students, just going and seeing so many excited, exuberant, happy women was a hugely positive experience for them. Now the final thing was that we know from research that if we offer young women and also underrepresented minorities the opportunity to be engaged in a research project early in their university experience, they're much more likely to persist in the major. And so for four years we offered between eight and twelve young women between the first year at MUD and the second year at MUD the opportunity to be part of a summer research experience. Now we actually offer a lot of these research experiences across all disciplines in science and engineering at MUD and we often offer them to our male students as well as our female students. But in this particular case it was really the first time our computer science department had offered them at such an early stage. Often these experiences are available after your second or third year as an undergraduate. All of these together took the number of female students graduating in our CS major from less than three or at three to around thirty. Now you might say, so how does that work? I mean that's a multiple of ten. Could that really be going from ten to forty percent? Well of course what really happened was the things we did to make that intro course more interesting to the young women in the class also made it more interesting to many of the young men. And so now we have seen that the size of our computer science major has almost tripled over the nine years that I've been at Harvey Mide College. Now each of these things we have written several papers about them. We make the materials for our introductory computer science course available on a Harvey Mide website. And soon we're going to be offering a massive open online course and MOOC via edX that will also provide a lot of the resources for our introduction to computer science course. Now one thing I should make clear is when we made these changes it's not that our young women would take one, take the intro CS class and say, oh I'm going to be a CS major. No, they'd say, oh that's a great course. I think I'm going to take the next course which is the CX 60. Then they'd get a, they didn't get a summer research experience. They'd get an industry internship at a place like Microsoft or Google or Facebook. They'd have a good experience there and then they'd say, okay I'm going to take the next course in the sequence which is CS 70 and usually sometime in the below CS 70 they'd go, I really like this. This is great. I guess I could be a CS major. So I think the real story about all this is computer science is a fascinating discipline. It has amazing job opportunities and opportunities to make contributions to the world today. And if we simply take away the fear factor and encourage everyone it makes the learning experience much better for everyone and it attracts young women and it keeps young women. Thank you. I hope you have a wonderful day in Geneva.