 Let me try and move this up. I have a pretty loud voice, so I don't want to scream too much. Is it working now? You hear me? Well, thank you, Jody, for that lovely introduction. Iconic paper. Wow. All right, so as Jody mentioned, I'm Tracy Camp from Colorado School of Minds. I am really excited to be here, excited and honored to be invited to speak with you today. I'm extremely impressed by this international gender gap project that you all are working on, and thank you so much for the opportunity to be a part of it. As mentioned, I'm a computer scientist at School of Minds. We refer to my department lovingly as CSAP Minds. So the survey results that we have been listening to this week have frankly been a bit depressing, right? Many things we have to work on in our various communities. So today, I'm going to talk about something that's a little bit better news, some good news that is happening in the computing community within the United States. The point of my talk is to share a success story within my department, talk about what's happening nationally for computer science within the United States because there's many success stories, and also try to put some emphasis on things that may be a value for the gender gap project. So those are the three goals I'm hoping to cover over the next hour. So first, let me share some good news. We're going to look at some data within CSAP Minds over time for the percent of women who are in our undergraduate computer science degree program. And here shows that over a 10-year period, we actually doubled the percent of women in our program, which is pretty impressive. I think it's wonderful news. Anybody want to do a happy dance with me? Very, very excited about the percent of women we have in CSAP Minds. And it has changed the face of our department from what we had 10 years ago. So two things I want to point out about this particular data. First of all, when you consider the environment within Minds, I think the percent increase is especially impressive. Most universities within the United States has about 57% women in their population. At Minds, we only have about 29% women because we're a science engineering institution. So the fact that we are up to over 21% within CS when our population is only 29% is especially impressive. You'll also notice that most of the upward trajectory has happened over the last four years. So what happened about four years ago for CSAP Minds? Well, our department actually was created four years ago. Prior to 2015, we were in an EE computer science and electrical engineering computer science degree program. And within that degree program, we had a department head who was an electrical engineering faculty member who did not think there was a problem with gender in our department. We had no women. That's not a problem. What? Of course, that's a problem. But the priorities were not there because of the leadership within the department. So when CS was able to split away from that environment and create our own department, the faculty within CS put a lot of diversity priorities in our new department. The new department also gave us a lot of visibility on campus, which helped us see, then, a tremendous growth in our student numbers within our program. And I know that we were able to leverage this growth in student interest with our diversity priorities in order to see the impact that we have seen over the last four years. So this slide shows the number of majors in the computer science program at Minds over time. And you can see we've really been growing rapidly just over the last couple of years. In fact, we have tripled in size in five years, tripled in five years, with most of the growth happening over the last four years. It explains why I'm really tired all the time is we have a lot more students. And as you can imagine, our faculty numbers did not triple in five years. We barely grew at all at the faculty level. So yes, so very, very busy in CS at Minds. I think that with the increase in majors, our percent of increase in women is also quite impressive because the raw numbers are quite high. That is, we went from fall 2008, we had 17 women in the CS program. And then in fall 2018, 10 years later, we had 120 women in our CS program and actually this fall, we have 145 women in computer science at Minds. We actually received recently some national recognition for the work that we have done in recruiting and retaining women within computer science at Minds. This recognition was an award from the National Center of Women in IT. I'll talk a little bit about NCWIT in a few moments because I think there might be some things that NCWIT is doing that would help the gender gap project. The best thing about the award is it came with $100,000, which is allowing us to even do more good work on our campus for women in computing. We are not the only department in the United States in computer science that is changing the face of their computing program. These other institutions that I list up here also have success stories in what their percent of women look like today versus what the percent looked like about 10 years ago. Unfortunately though, not all computer science programs at all universities in the United States have diversity priorities. And so we're seeing some universities and some departments that are making great strides and we're seeing other universities and other departments that are just maintaining their low percent of women in their department. In computer science, thanks to a lot of research that has been done over the last 15 years, we know now a lot of things that departments should do in the United States in order to change the face of computing and make sure that their door is open to everyone. But again, unfortunately some departments are not doing these things. The good news is in the United States there is a computing funding agency. Many of you might have heard of the National Science Foundation. NSF, our National Science Foundation, which funds a lot of grants to universities to do research. They are encouraging the computing community to do the right thing by holding the carrot. If you want funds from the National Center, National Science Foundation, you need to have activities that are going to improve your environment for computer science at your institution. So basically the directorate, our umbrella for computing research, which is referred to as SISE, which stands for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. Everybody just calls it SISE. At the NSF, the core programs within this huge directorate, which gives out millions of dollars of funding every year, the core programs, if you're going to get funding from one of those core programs, you need to propose diversity activities within your department that will have a positive impact. Because again, we know what needs to be done based on decades of research. And so everybody needs to get on board and start doing these things in order to have the needle move. So that is great news that NSF SISE is holding this carrot to encourage those universities that are not already on board. Many of us are already on board because we want our demographics to be more gender-equal than what they are today. So NSF is also encouraging departments, computer science departments, to create a broadening participation plan, referred to as a BPC plan, which talks about from the department level, these are the priorities that we are working on to change the demographics of our department. And then individual faculty members can plug into that pink plan and say, yeah, my department is doing X. So I am going to help with X by doing these steps. And so that makes it a little bit easier for the faculty members to plug into something that the department is doing overall. So there will be a first workshop to help departments create these BPC plans at the University of Illinois shortly after I get back from this trip. So that's pretty cool. I also want to note that the growth in computer science within the United States, it's not only just happening at my institution, this growth is happening nationally within US. Here are statistics from the universities that have PhD programs in computer science in the United States. And you can see the average number of CS majors per department is increasing pretty rapidly. And we are way above where we were at the height of the dot com boom back at the turn of the century. So lots of universities are feeling this growth, but many of them, again, are using the growth to their advantage to change the demographics of their program. So you might be wondering then, what did we do at CSM Mines in order to double the percent of women in our program? Well, before I get into that, I first want to talk about the landscape in gender efforts that exist within computer science within the United States or within North America, really, because in my opinion, the gender gap project can learn quite a bit from some of the things that we've been working on in North America for the last two to three decades. So first of all, all of you hopefully know about ACM already. ACM is our international organization for computer scientists, and ACMW support celebrates and advocates internationally for the full engagement of women in all aspects of the computing field. Jodi Thymes, who just introduced me, thanks again, Jodi, is the current chair of ACMW, and she's doing a fabulous job of helping computer science globally in diversity efforts. So within the gender gap preliminary report, I noticed that you had a identify a person or create a group specifically in charge of gender quality inside the organization, in charge of looking at the gender balance, and this is exactly what ACM did decades ago through the ACMW organization. They changed what exactly they did exactly they are, it's an organization now. All right, so that's ACM and ACMW, and at CSM Minds, we have leveraged much of ACMW's work over the years specifically for retention, so I'll talk about retention in a few moments. Before I get to that though, I wanna mention two other organizations within the United States or within North America that may be of value for the gender gap project to look at. The first is the National Center for Women in Information Technology. NCWIT uses a three prong strategy to improve awareness and knowledge and motivate change leaders to act. The most important prong, in my opinion, within NCWIT, this three prong approach, or one of the very important prongs, is the prong for equipped. Through lots of research over 15 plus years, NCWIT has created many online, freely available, research-based practices for reform at every level in computer science to help individuals implement change, raise awareness, and reach out to critical populations. I would strongly encourage the gender gap participants, this project, to check out the research-based best practices that exist on the NCWIT site because as the gender gap group knows, evaluation of initiatives is needed. Only 15% of initiatives in the database had been evaluated for effectiveness or impact in terms of outcomes and benefits to participants. Evaluation is essential. If you don't know whether some activity is going to work, you shouldn't implement it, right? It takes a lot of time to implement something, so understanding the impact of some implementation is vital, and so I encourage you again to check out NCWIT's source, you can do that at this site, and within CSF Minds, the work that we have done over the last 10 years, especially the last five years, is all based on these research-based best practices that we understand now through this organization. Many universities in the United States are changing their face of computing because of what we now understand of what needs to be done through this organization, so I strongly encourage you to check that out. So a little, I'm gonna take a little bit of a tangent, and I hate to be a bit of a downer on your gender gap good practices database, but let me give you a little history lesson in computer science that might be of value. We actually created a database of good practices about 10 years ago. This database was funded by the National Science Foundation. We created the database, we got the funding, we built the database, we put it online, we advertised it through the community, and now 10 years later, the link doesn't even work anymore because there was no funding to maintain the database. That's the key point here. Lots of funding organizations in the United States, they're all about building things. They were happy to give us the funding to build the database. They didn't give us funding to maintain the database, and so for the gender gap database project, I just strongly encourage you to figure out how you're going to maintain the database, otherwise why spend the time to build it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you need. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what you need is some organization that oversees this database and has funding for people to maintain it over time. So building it is one thing, maintaining it is vital. So within computer science, we actually just got funding recently, again from the National Science Foundation, to again build a new database of things for the community. We're now referring to this as BPCNET for Broadening Participation in Computing, and fortunately, this is being done under the Computing Research Association umbrella, so I'm hopeful that CRA will keep maintaining this database so once it's developed. So CRA, the Computing Research Association in North America is the last organization I wanted to introduce to you. So CRA, just like ACM, has a arm of its organization that is focused on widening participation. We used to be called CRAW for women. We recently, just this year, changed our name to CRAWP for widening participation to be more inclusive of other minority groups within computer science, such as African Americans, Hispanics, those who are disabled, et cetera. CRAWP's mission is to increase the success and participation of women and underrepresented people in computing research. We provide individual and group mentoring to undergraduates, graduate students and professionals in both industry and academia, and we're impacting quite a few people every single year through the various CRAWP programs. So I noticed, you know, CRAWP's main work actually is similar to this particular bullet that is in the gender gap report, so I totally agree that that is a valuable thing to have. Another project within CRAWP that I wanted to point out is a project to increase the perception and visibility of women's research work in science. We have a project within CRAWP that matches up with this bullet within your preliminary report. We refer to this project as RECOG, for, which isn't actually a great name, RECOG, for recognizing notable women and members of underrepresented groups in computing. And we're soon going to have, I don't want to quite put up the URL because it's not quite ready to take a look at, but we will soon have an online database of women in various computing research fields that's gonna look something like this. This is going to be, or this is available, actually. This is a women in computing database for women in the architecture research field, and you can search by research interests, you can search by profile type and see various women who are working in the WIC Arc area. So one of the reasons for this particular project to get going is not just to increase the visibility of women and people from underrepresented groups, but also many of us in computer science research are tired of hearing, well, we don't have women available to invite to do some awesome role, so we hear that a lot. And so this will make the women in the various computing research areas a bit more visible to their community. Other RECOG activities include a Wikipedia project, so I noticed the gender gap tomorrow morning actually will be a session on Wikipedia for the gender gap project, and I would encourage, you know, consider or suggest that the people involved in that project check out this page for writing Wikipedia pages for women in computing. This page actually has a specific page devoted to how you go about creating a Wikipedia page, because it's actually not very intuitive on how you create it, so just having this as a resource could help assist you in your efforts. In addition to this Wikipedia, trying to get more women in computer science pages in Wikipedia, and it was because of this project that I actually now have a Wikipedia page. My kids, I'll tell you, were so excited when I got my own Wikipedia page in my favor. I was like, oh my gosh, mom's famous. But it's all because of this project that I had that Wikipedia page created. But in addition to the Wikipedia page, we also have created these computing cards where members of computer science can purchase a deck of cards where each card has a different woman in computing research highlighted, or you can download free of charge a poster of all the cards and put it up on your wall. So all of these types of activities fall within the recognition project, and I know that that is something that the Gender Gap Preliminary Report talks about as well. So you can learn more about CRAWP at that particular URL. So the best thing, in my opinion, the last thing I wanna note about these three organizations, which I'm extremely grateful for, is all three of them work together really, really well and collaboratively. We all have the end goal in mind, which is to reach gender parity in computer science, but each of these organization focuses on different aspects of the problem, and then sometimes we come together and focus on something together. And I think that that's extremely valuable for all of our individual missions. Okay, so back to the success story in CS at Mines. So what has CS at Mines done over the last several years? Well, we've actually done quite a bit, and I wish I could say what we did had the biggest impact, but the only way to know that is if we would implement one thing evaluated, implement something else evaluated, implement something else evaluated, and that would take a lot of, so we didn't do that, frankly. We just started implementing lots of things, and then we started seeing some real positive changes in our demographics. My gut says that all the things we did helped in different ways, and then combined created the changes that we have seen. So I'm gonna go through the activities and programs that we set up really, really quickly. These are just examples of things that other institutions could do if interested. If anybody would like to chat more about any given particular program, I would be happy to do that offline. So we knew we had a recruitment problem by looking at the data. We were not getting enough women applying to computer science at Mines, and not enough women studying CS at Mines, and so we implemented several programs for recruitment. One of my most favorite ones I like to talk about is DECTECH, which stands for Discover, Explore, Create Technology. This is a K to 12 outreach program where we have approximately, we have between 250 to 300 girls come to Mines every semester four times. It's a STEM outreach program where they come four times, and one of the times that they come, the focus is on computer science. The other three we rotate, they learn about biomedical engineering, they learn about electrical engineering, they learn about physics, for example. And the nice thing about the program is it's implemented by a bunch of female students at Mines, many of whom are in computer science because the program was launched from computer science. So this program comes right out of your preliminary report on strategies to implement include, and you can read those details, I'm sure you have several times, to introduce various science programs to girls, and then also mention summer camps. DECTECH also has summer camps that we offer, and in the summer camps we invite boys to come. So I've been amazed at how this program, this DECTECH program really took off. I actually implemented it for my daughter, many years ago when she was much younger. That was the whole point of the program. She's much more lovely young lady now. It's just amazing how quickly time goes. I'm sure all of you feel the same way. Anyways, I've just been amazed at how the program implemented it just to help my daughter and her friends grew into this big program with hundreds of girls being involved every single year. I had no idea the impact that it would have when I started the program several years ago, and we've won many awards through this program, various awards, but one I just wanted to point out is yesterday one of the projects that was mentioned in the talk yesterday under good practices from the million women mentors, DECTECH won the stand up for STEM award, I think like two or three years ago, so that's pretty cool. Something I noticed in the preliminary report is it says what is the ideal ratio of boys to girls in programs designed to motivate girls in science? I wanted to touch on this for a moment because this is something we looked at in regards to DECTECH. During the academic year, DECTECH is a girls only program, but during the summer we allow boys to come join the various activities we do during the summer when we have summer camps. So in the research and the reading I did about what that needs to look like if you're going to invite boys in, I saw some research that talked about how you just needed a simple majority of girls in order to make it a good environment for what you're trying to do. I saw other research that said you need about two thirds of the participants to be girls. So what we did at DECTECH, we've done this for several years, it was we have an all girls camp one week during the summer, we have an all boys camp one week during the summer, and then we have a mixed camp a third week during the summer in case one of those other weeks don't work out. But what we've found is this mixed camp is not going as well as I would like it to go. I think part of the issue is we have space to let's say have 25 kids. I have like 50 boys that one in and only like five girls that one in because most of the girls sign up for the all girls camp. And so if I'm going to keep this, you know what is suggested in the literature, I can only let five boys in for example, but I have space for a lot more than that. And so we end up in letting more boys in and frankly, it's just like what the research says, the boys kind of overtake the environment and the girls just kind of watch and it is not what we're looking to do. So we just decided this summer, this past summer, we're not doing mixed camps anymore. We're going to have girls camps, we're going to have boys camps and that's what we're going to be doing moving forward. So another thing we implemented when the CSM minds program department was launched is we created a program called on tour CSM minds on tour in this program we go into schools. Dectec is an after school program and so it only works out for the girls that are able to come to mind after school several times during the semester and we wanna make sure we're reaching, you know, all the kids in our local community. So in this program, we send diverse CS students into various schools. Sometimes we go into elementary schools, classrooms, sometimes middle schools, sometimes high schools and we talk about computer science and we implement fun engaging hands-on activities when we do it. Many of these activities address very subtly the biases that we know exist in computing and so we're kind of subtly, you know, putting this out to the kids in our local area. So I think that that has been good and the activities and, you know, kind of the fun things that we do in this program are based on advice, again, from the National Center for Women in IT. We also revamped our 101 class. A lot of students at Mines take 101 which is a breadth computer science class. It's not a programming class. Many universities start with programming and they don't start with the societal impacts that computer scientists have on our world and research shows that women, more likely than men, are really drawn to computer science because of the impacts they can have on society and so we created a 101 class that is specifically a breadth computer science class that talks about the societal impacts of computer science and then we added a peer mentoring program where our peer mentors, there's half women, half men, all computer science majors. I have African Americans, I have Hispanics, you know, a very diverse group of mentors and we train them in inclusive practices before we put them to work in the program and so I think that that has helped encourage other diverse populations to consider computer science degree program at Mines. Then lastly, we do some professional development of teachers in our local area and this allows us to get connections with high schools so that we can help train the teachers in inclusive practices in computer science as well as we can recruit from them. So those were all recruitment type activities that we started. We also knew from our data that we had retention issues and so we've implemented a few things to help with our retention problems, one of which is making sure our ACMW student chapter is strong and thriving and active and successful so we do that. Another is we have implemented a celebration of women in computing where several women at several universities come together, several university computer science women come together every other year to support and encourage each of each other. We started it as the Colorado celebration but our other local states were interested in joining so we changed the name to Rocky Mountain Celebration so this was the last one last fall and I make sure to take all, as many see us at Mines women that I can get to go to this event. I make it a priority. So that picture shows our t-shirts and our branding and the community coming together and then that's a bit more fun of a picture. The other thing I've learned through the years is that our recruitment programs actually have helped with our retention programs and I didn't realize this was gonna happen but looking 2020, I mean hindsight is always 2020, it totally makes sense. It's groups of women and diverse students that are helping implement these programs so of course they're going to bond and support each other and help each other through the program so that's been an added benefit of those recruiting programs. Then lastly, a welcoming culture. We know that a welcoming culture is key to make sure that the female students know the door is open and encouraged to walk in through our door and so we have spent some money to create nice welcoming spaces like our hello world wall when you first walk into the computer science area. We do a lot of things to make sure we have a nice strong community within see us at Mines. In fact, other students in other programs are often envious of what we do within see us at Mines. So for example, we have a Funch or Fike program where see us at Mines students can ask a faculty member to go out to lunch or go on a hike, a Funch or Fike and spend time with a faculty member outside of the classroom. And this program does not cost that much and our students, many of our students really enjoy it. We do a two truce, that's a binary two, two truce and a lie of all our faculty where our students have to guess each faculty member's lie that we post on the door each year so the students start to get to know us. We celebrate our successes. This is Quacker the Hacker, our success duck that gets passed around based on who has a recent success and we have a every semester computing innovation fair where we highlight the projects that students are working on within our classes. So I showed you a picture of my daughter. Here's a picture of Max, my son. And there if you like CS history, make sure to go to Bletchley Park sometime. It's a great outing. All right, so we've done a lot in CS at Mines which has helped led us to the success we've seen and a lot of that might be a little overwhelming. So I wanted to kind of bring it all down to what I think departments should do and I would encourage the gender gap project to consider putting something like these steps in the preliminary, the recommendations. In my opinion, it is vital to set goals. What are you trying to accomplish? If you don't have goals, if you're just implementing things randomly without specific goals in mind, then you're not gonna be heading to where you wanna go. So first set goals. Then second, you have to understand your environment and your local data to be able to implement the right things. Implement activities strategically based on the data in the environment that you understand. If you're implementing something that does great in solving problem X and you don't have problem X, then don't waste your time implementing that. Figure out where your problems are. So for example, do you have cultural issues within your faculty? If so, implement some implicit bias training and other things to try and change the culture of your department. How many women apply to your program? How many women are accepted? How does that compare to the men? How many then commit to your program from the accepted base and how does that compare to the men? Where are the issues within your program? Each of our programs are different. Many of us have similar issues, but some of us have different issues than others. So figuring out where your issues are and then implementing strategically is in my opinion, vital. And then a constant feedback loop is needed. It is an ongoing problem until we reach close to 50-50. We're just gonna have to keep working on this. So real quickly, goals within computer science. So we set these goals. When we set this 20%, we set it back when we had about 11.9% women. I thought this goal was like a huge stretch goal. We've already surpassed it. I'm now thinking this is a huge stretch goal because this is what our current population is. We would be at parity if we reached 30% by 2030. But maybe it's not such a stretch goal. We'll see what happens over time. We also set a goal to implement 90% of NCWID's best practices. Maybe best practices is a bit overboard, calling them that. They call it activities. So NCWID has this activity reference sheet with 81 different activities, departments, computer science departments may wanna implement. We set a goal to implement 90% of them and we currently have 74 of those implemented. And I know that that has made a positive impact for our particular program and other programs that are seeing improvements in their demographics in computer science. So I encourage the gender gap to check out that document. Again, understanding your environment and data is crucial. We have many surveys that were created for computer science community that could easily be adapted for other disciplines such as the student experience of the major. What do your students think about your program? How do those students compare with students from other universities? Where are the issues within your particular program? The Data Buddies Project helps us see how our students compare to other students from other universities so we can see what we're doing well in certain parts of our department and what we need to improve on. There's also various things where you can analyze surveys where you can analyze what the faculty think about work-life balance and what cultural issues you might have within your department. And there's some inclusive instruction. Are your faculty using inclusive instruction practices within their department? If not, then that's something you can work on. So again, understanding your environment is vital because we all have different environments and then understanding the data is also vital. The data in the literature, the data in your university, the data within your department. To give you two examples, we had a major attrition problem for computer science at Mines. This was a freshman to sophomore attrition problem. And so when we learned that, we implemented specific programs for freshmen to sophomore retention to turn this particular data around and now male and female attrition is about the same. A second example is we learned that 21% of the female applicants to Mines were accepted but we were only getting 16% that enrolled. So again, we implemented a specific activity just for this data point. And that activity is we have current CSM Mines women do video calls with accepted women to talk about our program and encourage them to come to Mines. It was a very simple activity that we implemented and now today we actually have a, the acceptance rate is still about the same but the committed rate is closer to 25%. So we were able to turn that data point into something positive by a specific strategic implementation on that data. So again, understanding your data and implementing activities strategically is what is needed. And then a constant feedback loop is just, just yeah, it's just required until we get to gender equality. So a final few thoughts, computing has made progress but we still have a long way to go. This progress requires commitment from the department, commitment from the administration, commitment from the broader community and organizations involved in computer science. And fortunately within CSM Mines, I have all of those things and then requires us to just have constant focus, tracking the data, seeing where our issues are, implementing strategically and moving the ball forward. So I always put pictures of my kids in my talk. I actually have a reason for doing so that you can talk to me offline about that if you would like to. But one time I got asked, do you have a husband? I do, his name's Glenn. So thank you for your time.