Computing Research Policy Blog

Gates Tells Congress to Support Research

“Research is where it’s at,” Bill Gates said yesterday summing up his (and CRA's, in fact) message for federal funding priorities in a single sentence to the House Science and Technology Committee. The response came in the final minutes of the hearing when Gates was asked what the priority for federal funding should be given that there is a finite amount of federal money to spend and the large number of potential science and technology areas it could be spent on.

Gates’ appearance before the committee, his last as Chairman of Microsoft, was in commemoration of the committee’s 50th anniversary. The theme of the hearing was familiar to those in the science and technology realm—Competitiveness and Innovation. Gates’ testimony, both written and in response to questions, followed the arguments he and the rest of the S&T community have been making for the last several years: the urgency for improving STEM education at the K-12 level, the critical need for federal funding of basic research, the importance of attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to U.S. universities, the need to increase diversity in STEM fields, and the requirement that we do whatever we can to retain talent in the U.S.

The entire written testimony and a webcast of the hearing are available on the committee web site. In it, Gates, not unexpectedly, highlights the important contributions of information technology and its great potential to aid in solving some of the trickiest problems we face:

Computing and software will also play an increasingly central role in scientific research. We are rapidly moving into an era of data-centric computational science in which researchers across a wide range of disciplines routinely use software and computers as essential tools for investigation and collaboration. The ability to use computers to model complex systems is transforming the way we learn about everything from genomics and biosciences to physics and astronomy. In the future, scientific computing will play a profoundly important role in advances that will help us treat diseases, address climate change, and confront many other critical issues.

...But he raises important questions about whether we're doing all we can to insure the U.S. remains an innovation leader:

As I hope these remarks reflect, I am optimistic about the potential for technology to help us find new ways to improve people’s lives and tackle important challenges. I am less optimistic, however, that the United States will continue to remain a global leader in technology innovation. While America’s innovation heritage is unparalleled, the evidence is mounting that we are failing to make the investments in our young people, our workers, our scientific research infrastructure, and our economy that will enable us to retain our global innovation leadership.

In particular, I believe that there are two urgent reasons why we should all be deeply concerned that our advantages in science and technology innovation are in danger of slipping away.

First, we face a critical shortfall of skilled scientists and engineers who can develop new breakthrough technologies. Second, the public and private sectors are no longer investing in basic research and development (R&D) at the levels needed to drive long-term innovation.

If the United States truly wants to secure its global leadership in technology innovation, we must, as a nation, commit to a strategy for innovation excellence – a set of initiatives and policies that will provide the foundation for American competitive strength in the years ahead. Such a strategy cannot succeed without a serious commitment from – and partnership between – both the public and private sectors. It will also need to be flexible and dynamic enough to respond to rapid changes in the global economy.

Update: Some press coverage of the hearing from Forbes, the Washington Post, and one in Inforworld (though the latter focuses almost exclusively on Gates' H-1B testimony).

CRA Selects Richard Ladner as 2008 A. Nico Habermann Award Winner

CRA's A. Nico Habermann Award is usually presented annually to a person who has made outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the numbers and/or successes of underrepresented members in the computing research community. It honors the late A. Nico Habermann, who headed NSF's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and who was deeply committed to increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computing research.

The CRA board has selected Richard E. Ladner, Boeing Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, to receive the 2008 Habermann Award. Professor Ladner is recognized for his lifelong, strong and persistent advocacy on behalf of people with disabilities in the computing community.

Ladner's contributions have taken three forms: mentoring of students, research both with and for persons with disabilities, and national advocacy. He is known for his dedicated, one-on-one mentoring of students (both with and without disabilities). Over the past 15 summers, he has worked with 38 severely disabled high school students on week-long summer projects in computing. Ladner has also mentored undergraduates and graduate students with disabilities, often working with them on assistive technology research. His assistive technology efforts have resulted in networking (remote login, email) for Seattle's deaf-blind community, large-print user interfaces for Unix machines, video compression algorithms that are tailored to American Sign Language and simple enough to implement in real-time on a cell phone, and new image processing and enhancement algorithms to convert graphical images--diagrams in math and science textbooks--into tactile images.

Richard Ladner currently co-leads the NSF-sponsored AccessComputing Alliance, a national effort to increase the number of students with disabilities majoring in computing. As part of their effort, the Alliance hosts workshops and summer camps around the country, and Ladner has run many of these, including a three-day Vertical Mentoring Workshop for the Blind in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and a nine-week summer camp for deaf students. Ladner has also been tireless in his advocacy at the national level: he has spoken to many groups, including department chairs at the CRA Conference at Snowbird, and worked with organizations and departments (through AccessComputing's communities of practice) to make it easier for students with disabilities to fully participate.

Tapia Conference Coverage

Coverage from the Tapia Conference (previous post)...

Former CRA board member John King kicked off the second day of the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing with a diversity focused plenary emphasizing the evolution of cultural context. Using historical examples Dr. King focused on the changes of the last 200 years in the US that show the progression of society in accepting and celebrating the differences between the majority and the minority groups. He emphasized that the context changes the point of view and different points of view provide more information. That is why diversity is so important.

This echoes strongly the plenary given yesterday afternoon by Norman Johnson of Referentia Systems. His talk discussed the importance of mass knowledge and that the knowledge of large groups is often more accurate than the knowledge of issue area experts. Without diversity, that mass knowledge is, in effect, "dumbed-down."

A panel discussing why computing departments fail to retain underrepresented students if universities care about diversity noted the need for role models and emphasis on getting underrepresented students through the first year by building community and accepting cultural differences.

More to come...

Tapia and Hopper Conferences

The government affairs team here at CRA is headed to Orlando next week! I will be bringing you updates from the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing conference and Peter will let you know what’s happening at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. The conferences are co-located this year, so it'll be interesting to see how that affects the overall dynamic of both conferences. I'm guessing it'll be a big positive, but we'll see. Stayed tuned!

Patent team diversity good for business

Forbes.com has an interesting article about a survey on the role of women in patents. The survey (PDF), from the National Center for Women & Information Technology, shows that patents by mixed-gender teams are cited more often than those of single-gender teams.

Not a lot of new information in the article but it points out something that CRA and NCWIT have been saying for a long time: a diverse workforce is an asset to American business.

"Our data show that diversity of thought matters to innovation," says NCWIT Chief Executive Lucinda Sanders, who holds six telecom software patents. "We can say involving women is important because women are half the population and have good ideas, but our study shows the impact for companies."

It’s worth a read.

Women and IT in BizTech

The BizTech blog at the Wall Street Journal had a good post today on women in IT. Some of the comments by readers are interesting but some of them are clearly part of the problem. Check it out here.

President Will Sign COMPETES Act, Will Be Law Tomorrow!

It's done! It's done! By now, I expect that everyone has heard that both the House and Senate have agreed on the conference report for H.R. 2272, The America COMPETES Act and that the measure is headed to the President for his signature.

Word comes from the White House today that the President will sign the bill in a small signing-ceremony tomorrow with the Members of Congress who were instrumental in moving the bill along. While it's a bit of a bummer that the President isn't making a big "to-do" about this with representatives from industry and academia and lots of press -- it does, after all, enact many portions of his own American Competitiveness Initiative, and it's also an issue that polls really well, a fact you'd think would be important to both a Congress and a President who could use a few good examples of positive, bi-partisan legislation to show off -- the important thing is it's getting signed. After nearly two years of wrangling over this particular set of proposals -- and a lot longer than that to get the Administration and the Congress to understand the import of the problems addressed -- the President will sign the bill and its provisions will be law.

That deserves some kudos, back-patting, and maybe one or two loud "whoo-hoo's."

Especially because this bill has a lot of good things in it. As Cameron Wilson points out over on the USACM Technology Policy Blog, the bill takes two basic routes to fostering the innovation the country will require to stay competitive in an increasingly global world. It addresses federal support for research -- both authorizing large amounts of new funding for three key science agencies (National Science Foundation, NIST, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science), setting a target to double the agencies budgets over 7 years, and by creating a new high-risk research agency at the Department of Energy (called the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy, or ARPA-E, in a nod to the DARPA-like character Congress hopes the agency will adopt). And the bill addresses a diversity of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education efforts. For these, I'll simply steal what Cameron has already written:

The bill authorizes $43.3 billion over the next three fiscal years for STEM education programs across the federal government. The variety is impressive ranging from new k-12 teacher programs to new opportunities for undergraduate and graduate STEM students. Here is a sampling of the proposals:

• Expands the Robert Noyce program which links students in STEM fields up with education degrees so they can teach STEM in K-12;
• Authorizes two new competitive grant programs that will enable partnerships to implement courses of study in mathematics, science, engineering, technology or critical foreign languages in ways that lead to a baccalaureate degree with concurrent teacher certification;
• Authorizes competitive grants to increase the number of teachers serving high-need schools and expand access to AP and IB classes and to increase the number of qualified AP and IB teachers in high-need schools; and,
• Expands early career grant programs and provides additional support for outstanding young investigators at both NSF and DOE.

In addition, the legislation has several provisions that expand outreach to women and minorities in STEM fields. The lack of females and minorities has been a key problem in computing, so this is another welcome effort.

In addition, the bill contains two particular provisions I wanted to highlight because they're of particular interest to the computing community:

The first is Section 7024, "High-performance Computing and Networking" (if you're following along at home (pdf)) -- the inclusion of the High-Performance Computing Research and Development Act that has been much discussed on these pages since some of the earliest days of this blog. The bill has been proposed in various forms in every session of Congress since the 106th (we're now in the 110th) and has never gained the full approval of the Congress -- almost always for reasons unrelated to the bill. The bill has, in sessions past, been approved by the House only to languish in the Senate due to jurisdictional fights over other bills, approved by the House Science committee only to run afoul of budget disputes with the GOP Leadership, and been held hostage over fights about NASA between the House and Senate. In fact, until the approval of the conference report last week, it was assumed that this version HPC R&D Act might meet a similar fate as word escaped that some of the Senate conferees thought its inclusion might cause some jurisdictional friction between two Senate committees (Energy and Commerce, who both claim HPC jurisdiction). But those problems were resolved, and the bill includes the full House-approved language, plus an extra section that authorizes efforts in "Advanced Information and Communications Technology Research" at NSF, including research on:

• affordable broadband access, including wireless technologies;
• network security and reliability;
• communications interoperability;,
• networking protocols and architectures, including resilience to outages or attacks;
• trusted software;
• privacy;
• nanoelectronics for communications applicaitons;
• low-power communications electronics;
• implementation of equitable access to natinoal advanced fiber optic research and educational networks in noncontiguous States; and
• other areas the Director [of NSF] finds appropriate.

The provision also allows NSF to fund multiyear, multidisciplinary "Centers for Communications Research" to "generate innovative approaches to problems in information and communications technology research."

Otherwise, the HPC R&D Act remains essentially unchanged, which means it includes two provisions we particularly like: it requires the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems; and there's now an explicit requirement that the President's advisory committee for IT (now PCAST) review not only the goals of the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, but the funding levels as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years.

The second noteworthy provision in the COMPETES bill is one (Sec. 7012) that was originally included in the House-passed NSF Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 1867), that should help clarify NSF's role in supporting efforts that seek to encourage the participation of women and underrepresented groups in computing, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As we noted back in March, this is a response to long-standing concerns from CRA and other members of the computing and science communities about NSF's role. Basically, NSF's general policy is to only support efforts that represent novel approaches. Yet, what's often needed in these cases isn't a novel approach, just a sustained one. The House Science and Technology Committee agreed and included language in the NSF Authorization that addresses the issue by allowing the Director of NSF to review such programs one year before their grants expire and issue extensions of up to three years without recompetition to those efforts that appear to be successful at meeting their stated goals. It also emphasizes that the committee believes this sort of effort -- maintaining the strength and vitality of the U.S. science and engineering workforce -- is appropriately part of the agency's mission. So, we're thrilled that the provision survived the conference and will become law with the President's signature tomorrow.

This is, of course, not the end of innovation efforts in the Congress or the Administration. While this bill sets nice, juicy funding targets for NSF, NIST and DOE Office of Science, it doesn't actually appropriate a single dime, so the focus will continue to be on House and Senate appropriators as they wind their way through the appropriations process later this year. We're still expecting a meltdown in that process, so nothing is guaranteed, despite all the supportive words from Congress and the President. And there will be further efforts to address some of the pieces of the various innovation agendas that aren't represented in H.R. 2272 -- like a permanent extension of the R&D tax credit.

But for now, I think it's probably appropriate to take a deep breath and savor this win for a day or two. This is a big victory for the science community and a long-time coming for those of us who have been working these issues around the Hill over the better part of the last decade. We commend the President and the Congress for having the vision and the commitment to push ahead on these issues, even when it didn't seem as politically popular as it is today. And we commend the members of the science community for speaking up on these issues, serving on the advisory committees, and partipating in the grassroots efforts to make Congress aware of the issues. Now, just make sure you go out and do world-leading science -- take risks, think audaciously...demonstrate as you've done so well in the past why America needs to continue to be an incubator for invention, discovery, and innovation.

And keep it tuned here for all the details... :)

Update: (8/9/07) -- It's official!:

President George W. Bush signs H.R. 2272, The America Competes Act, Thursday, Aug. 9, 2007, in the Oval Office. Pictured with the President are, from left: Director John Marburger of the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Senator Jeff Bingaman of N.M.; Congressman Bart Gordon of Tenn.; and Senator Pete Domenici of N.M. White House photo by Chris Greenberg

Update2: (8/10/07) -- Here are the President's comments about the bill and ACI, as well as an OSTP-produced fact sheet.

Competitiveness Bills Wrapping Up?

The long effort to address concerns about America's future competitiveness and capacity for innovation may finally result in a bill.

For the last two years, there's been a fairly constant drumbeat in Congress, the Administration, and federal advisory bodies over the need to prop up the U.S. innovation infrastructure -- by strengthening the federal investment in basic research in the physical sciences (including computing, mathematics and engineering), by investing in new math and science teachers, by increasing the participation of US students in math and science, and by creating new research organizations to help nurture an innovative culture in some federal research agencies. There's been a whole suite of different bills proposed to address these proposals -- many inspired by the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm report, or many of the other similar reports that have come out of the scientific community and American industry over the past several years. Unfortunately, though many of these bills had passed either the House or the Senate last session, none had passed both and gone on to the President.

But, that could change. As we've noted previously, this suite of competitiveness proposals has coaliesced into two different pieces of legislation, one House bill and one Senate bill -- both essentially omnibus bills that are collections of most of the previous proposals. The Senate passed its version, S. 761 The America COMPETES Act, in May by bundling a whole bunch of proposals together and having the Senate Leader bring the package directly to the Senate floor, bypassing the Senate committee structure (which would've tied things up for months). The House took a more piecemeal approach, passing the "10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds" Science and Math Authorization Act (HR 362), the Sowing the Seeds Through Science and Engineering Act (HR 363), the High Performance Computing Research and Development Act (HR 1068), the National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2007 (HR 1867), and the Technology Innovation and Manufacturing Stimulation Act (HR 1868), one-by-one (by overwhelming margins) over the course of several months, then combining them into one giant omnibus bill "The 21st Century Competitiveness Act" (HR 2272), which they passed by voice vote. The plan was to conference HR 2272 and S. 761 and work out a compromise bill both chambers could approve. It appears that negotiation is nearing its end and a final bill may be on its way.

We just got a notice of a meeting with Speaker Pelosi scheduled for tomorrow at which the House and Senate leadership will discuss the conference agreement. We know that the bills have been exhaustively "pre-conferenced" with the various committee staff over the last couple of weeks. The official conferees -- the Representatives and Senators who were appointed to serve on the conference committee -- will meet tonight to hammer out the final details. So, this time tomorrow we should have a good sense of what made the bill and what didn't.

We'll have all the details as they are released, of course. There are some provisions in the the House and Senate bills about which the computing research community has had particular interest. More detail on those later. But for now, it's nice to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Congress -- and the Administration -- has spent a lot of time over the last two years talking about the importance of bolstering the chain of innovation that helps keep America a world leader, but they don't have much to show for it. It appears that could change soon.

Update: (7/30/07 10 pm ET) -- The conference committee has reached agreement on a compromise bill. It's massive -- 470 pages -- but you can poke through it here (pdf) if you're so inclined. We'll have details on the bill in the next day or so, but after a brief look through the bill it's fair to say there's a lot of good news for the community in there -- including the High Performance Computing R&D Act, which has died every previous Congress since the 106th (this is the 110th). So keep it tuned here for more detail....

Attracting Women to Computer Science

While we see articles about the decline of computer science majors, particularly women, almost daily, the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece (sub. req’d.) about what a couple of universities are doing to attract and retain women in computer science programs.

Lucy Sanders of the National Center for Women in Information Technology has perhaps the key quote in the piece about the problem of recruiting and retaining computer science majors. "You walk into an intro class, and you start learning a programming language that eventually gets a machine to spit out a string of numbers," says Lucy Sanders, chief executive of the women-and-technology center. "That's not what computing is about. Computing is about solving real problems in medicine, or oceanography, and that's what people who do it love. But the intro courses don't teach that at all."

We've also noted on CRA's Computing Research Policy Tumble Log a couple of related articles in the last few days. One from Ars Technica, and another that's an AP story.

Update: The article does confuse enrollment and interest in computing at one point. Interest in computer science as a major among women dropped 70 percent between 2000 and 2005, not actual enrollment....

Two Interesting Posts...

...on Jim Horning's Nothing is as simple as we hope it will be blog. The first, on a recent cyber security hearing on the Hill has a nice extended quote from the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and S&T of the House Committee on Homeland Security, complaining about the gutting of the cyber security R&D budget at DHS.

The second is a summary of a paper by Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier on the impact of (perceived) user gender on the cyber attack threat (quick summary: "females" are much more likely to get attacked), which concludes with this great quote from Jim:

If this hostility is anywhere near the typical Internet experience, is it any wonder that computing and IT are increasingly losing the women?"

Frances Allen Honored by House of Representatives

A resolution to honor Frances E. Allen, the 2006 recipient of ACM's A.M. Turing Award, passed the House today. House Concurrent Resolution 95 was introduced by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and reported out of the House Science and Technology Committee last week.

We wrote about Dr. Allen here when the Turning Award was announced in February. She was the first woman to receive the award since it was first given forty years ago. Dr. Allen was an IBM Fellow at the TJ Watson Research Center.

A press release from the House Science and Technology Committee stated:

H. Con. Res. 95 recognizes her achievements in computer research and development while working at IBM Corporation, and salutes the Turing Award Committee for recognizing the contributions of women to the field of computing.

"It is certainly telling that women, who earn more than half of all undergraduate degrees in this country and make up more than half of the professional workforce, represent only 25% percent of all information technology workers," Woolsey said. "Dr. Allen has been an inspirational mentor to younger researchers and a leader within the computing community and it is clear that Dr. Allen deserves recognition for all of the tireless work she has done to promote women's role in computing."

NSF Reauthorization

The House Science and Technology Committee is set to hold two markups for a National Science Foundation reauthorization bill that Chairman Gordon would like to pass this year. The Research and Science Education subcommittee will hold their markup on April 19 and the full committee will have the markup on April 25. The committee has already had two hearings on the NSF reauthorization in March.

CRA has seen some draft language and we think it looks pretty good. It includes authorization of funding at levels that fit with the goals of the ACI and the Democratic Innovation Agenda to double NSF over the next seven years. We are particularly pleased with language that could help programs aimed at increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in science. The language allows the NSF Director the option of continuing funding for these programs after their initial grant award expires if they're demonstrating success and the problem they seek to address persists.

The language implicitly attempts to clarify NSF's role in supporting efforts that seek to encourage the participation of women and underrepresented groups in computing, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (CSTEM) disciplines. This is a response to long-standing concerns from CRA and other members of the computing and science communities about NSF's role. In a letter to the Chairman Gordon back in February, CRA along with 11 other organizations laid out the issue:

NSF, in fulfillment of its mission to "strengthen the U.S. scientific and engineering research potential," has been very supportive of efforts designed to reach out to women and underrepresented groups in CSTEM. Recognizing the magnitude of the problem within computing, NSF has funded efforts within its Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate to address it, including the current Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) initiative. These programs have good track records of funding efforts within the community that have demon- strated effectiveness -- for example, programs and institutions like the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), the Computer Science Teachers Association, and CRA's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing (CRA-W), which received the President's Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring in 2004.

Our concern is that NSF, while very willing to fund new programs to address these underrepresentation issues, does not have a funding model to support successful efforts on anything approaching a sustaining basis. Unfortunately, there are no other agencies that have shown a willingness to adopt these successful programs once orphaned by NSF, and it has so far proven difficult for industry to fund them on a sustaining level. So successful efforts -- even those that have been independently evaluated and demonstrated effective -- must be restructured substantially to include new approaches in order to satisfy NSF’s guidelines about new programs and receive new funding when their original grants expire (typically in 3 to 5 years). As you can imagine, this is incredibly counter-productive, especially as the need for these programs remains great.

So we are particularly pleased with the language that allows (but does not mandate) NSF to continue funding programs with proven track records to encourage underrepresented groups to enter CSTEM fields for an additional funding cycle without needing to make significant revisions to the programs. By including the language, it seems clear that the committee is endorsing the view that it's an appropriate a part of the NSF mission to support these efforts, and giving the agency the flexibility to continue those programs that appear to be working.

We'll keep you posted on the bill as it moves through the markup process.

Update: HR 1867, the NSF Authorization Act of 2007, was passed today by voice vote out of the Subcommittee on Research and Education with three amendments. The amendments included a request for a yearly report by NSF on the agencies Education and Human Resources funding allocation, a joint report from NSF and the National Academies on the barriers to STEM participation for underrepresented minorities and policy strategies to correct the low participation, and a requirement to fund undergraduate research awards at a sustainable level by calling it out of the general NSF Research and Related Activities account. Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-IL), while not objecting to the last amendment, did cite concerns about designating funds within the general allocation and that doing so could eventually create a line item in the budget that would be vulnerable to cuts in the future.

The full Science and Technology Committee will mark up the bill next week.

Innovation Bill Moves Forward

The House Science and Technology Committee approved H.R. 362, the “10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds” Science and Math Scholarship Act, today and will recommend it to the House for consideration. The bill was passed with five amendments that are meant to improve access for teachers and students from low-income schools and to improve science labs in secondary schools.

The bill is based on the recommendations of the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm Report. A press release on the legislation states that the goal of the legislation is “increasing scholarships for students majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields and who are committed to pursuing teaching; establishing a teacher education program at the National Science Foundation to encourage education faculty to work with STEM faculty on ways to improve education for math and science teachers; providing in-service training to math and science teachers to improve content knowledge and teaching skills; and authorizing the development of master’s degree programs for in-service math and science teachers.”

This is just one of several innovation and competitiveness bills based on the Gathering Storm recommendations that the Committee has or plans to address this year, along with the reauthorization of NSF and the No Child Left Behind Act.

A webcast of the hearing is available.

Google Anita Borg Scholarship

Google announced today that the 2007-2008 Google Anita Borg Scholarship will be $10,000 for women recipients in the United States and that it is expanding to Europe this year with a €5,000 scholarship for recipients in Europe. All the details can be found on the Google Blog. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2007.

You can learn more about Anita Borg and her contributions to women's involvement in technology development at the Anita Borg Institute.

The Tenure Gender Gap

A National Academies report published this week discussing the gap between women and men in science academia is getting decent press in the national media. Both Newsweek and the New York Times have pieces covering the Academies' report "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.”

Both articles make the key point from the report: while women are getting a larger percentage of the graduate degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics than in the past, academic faculties do not reflect those gains. Women of minority groups are almost non-existent on faculties. Among the reasons given in the report for low numbers of women on faculties are: rigid tenure clocks, inadequate child care, and colleague and administration bias. The report also states that in order to address this issue, there must be widespread changes to academic departmental structure in order to address the problem and that the changes must start at the top.

The New York Times article ”Bias is Hurting Women in Science, Panel Reports” focuses on the reports findings and states:

For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nation’s doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minority groups are “virtually absent,” it adds.

The report also dismisses other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families. Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern of unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”

The Newsweek article ”Science and the Gender Gap”, which is part of a larger section on women in leadership, points out that this is not necessarily new information. The article states:

Though individual women may have understood what they were up against, there wasn't much of an organized effort to change things until an August day in 1994, when a group of tenured female faculty members at MIT met with physicist Robert Birgeneau, then the dean of the School of Science, to press their case that there was an institutional bias. "It was really a singular point," says Birgeneau, now the chancellor at Berkeley. Before that day, he says, it was easy to dismiss an individual woman's career problems as the result of a personality conflict or problems in her lab. But after investigating their complaints, he concluded that the problem was systemic.

In 1999, MIT issued a groundbreaking report which showed that tenured women professors made less money and received fewer research resources than their male colleagues. The next year MIT's president, Charles Vest, convened a meeting of administrators and scientists from 25 of the most prestigious U.S. universities who issued a unanimous statement agreeing that institutional barriers prevented women from succeeding in science.

Both articles are available online at ”Bias is Hurting Women in Science, Panel Reports” and ”Science and the Gender Gap”.

Another Piece of the Image Problem

Information Week spent a great deal of its July 17 issue discussing the IT workforce shortage and a variety of issues surrounding it. One of the articles, Computer Classes Seen as “Shop Class" at Many Schools, discusses an area of the talent pipeline that is contributing to the image problem of IT. The article starts:

If a kid takes a computer networking class as an elective, will college admissions departments look at it in the same spirit as an advanced physics class--or more akin to wood shop?

It goes on to discuss the different types of computer related courses that can be offered and the constraints that high schools are under as well as an example of a company program that works with schools on computer curriculum. However, it then states the disparity that while some computer classes are in the advanced placement or honors curriculum, others are often in the technical/vocational curriculum which makes parents steer their college-bound children away.

The question is, of course, a much more complicated one than just whether or not computer courses should be considered honors or vocational in high school. But it does raise the issue of how invasive the image problem that computer science suffers can be and the depth of the problem that needs to be addressed.

Getting Scientists and Congress to Mingle...

One of the most effective "tools" the science advocacy community has in making the case for federal support of science is, well, scientists. Those occasions in which researchers are able to sit down with Members of Congress and discuss their own work do more to advance the cause of science than five meetings with staff like me. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, scientists tend to be pretty smart and well-spoken. They've thought a lot about their work and usually understand how to explain it to lay people (despite the usual stereotypes about scientists, it's a rare exception to this rule). More importantly, they're usually pretty good at conveying why their work matters, and to do it in a way that makes any passion they feel for the research palpable. If they have the opportunity to spend 5, 10, 15 minutes with a Member, it's pretty good odds that Member will leave the meeting with a better appreciation for the work and a sense of connection to the researcher.

And that's no small thing. When the time comes to make decisions about priorities, a Member's personal connection to a researcher, an understanding of what research goes on in his or her district, and an understanding of the long-term benefits of that research all can help swing the balance in favor of science. They are by no means the only factors that go into that decision, but they're certainly weights we want to have on our side of the balance.

So I'm especially pleased to point out occasions when members of our community take time out of their schedules to spend time in Washington, mingling with policymakers and trying to convey a little of what it is they do. One occasion CRA tries to take advantage of every year is the Coalition for National Science Funding's Capitol Hill Science Exhibition and Reception, held this year on June 7th.

Each year, CNSF brings together 30-35 of its members to stage a science fair of sorts on Capitol Hill for Members of Congress and their staff as a way to highlight the important and interesting work enabled by the federal investment in basic research at the National Science Foundation. This year, CRA was well-represented at the Exhibition by Lucy Sanders and Katie Ertz from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT).

The NCWIT display occupied a unique niche at this year's exhibition. While the great majority of booths highlighted particular research efforts of NSF, NCWIT's was one of the few (if the only) to focus on NSF's broader role of developing the science and engineering workforce. In particular, Lucy and Katie were able to bring some attention to the continued need to focus on increasing the participation of underrepresented populations within that workforce.

The event was quite well-attended and Lucy and Katie found a number of willing listeners among Members of Congress (like Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI), seen at left), key congressional staffers, and a surprising number of agency personnel. There were times when it was quite difficult to move around the room, the bodies were packed so tightly. CNSF counted more than 300 attendees this year, including six Members of Congress, despite a very busy day in the House -- a very encouraging symbolic display of support for science.

Thanks to Lucy and Katie for their willingness to travel to DC and participate and for making the case so effectively. They join a growing list of CRA member institutions who have participated in CNSF Exhibitions, including James Hendler and his colleagues from the Mind Lab at the University of Marylandin 2005, DK Panda and his students from Ohio State University in 2004, Tim Finin and his colleagues and students from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2003, and Thad Starner and Janet Kolodner of Georgia Tech in 2002. If you're at a CRA-member institution and are interested in showing of your NSF-sponsored research at a future Hill event, drop me a line!

This is also a reminder that it's not too late to participate in CNSF's upcoming Fall Congressional Visits Day, scheduled for September 13, 2006 (with an orientation session on September 12th). This is a great opportunity to make sure computing researchers are represented as the research community goes up to the Hill to speak with one voice about the importance of the federal role in supporting research. CRA's Melissa Norr has all the details.

Interesting Notables

We’ve talked in the past about Microsoft’s efforts to support programs that aim to increase the participation of women and minorities in computing. One effort we haven’t covered, but is worth noting, is their “Channel 9” series on “wm_in – Women in Technology ”. Wm_in introduces women of all ranks in Microsoft, giving a glimpse into what they do and providing some not so subtle encouragements for women to enter into computer science. Women are interviewed about what they do, from a ‘lowly’ intern to a Vice President, giving all aspects and perspectives of working within a huge global company.

Check it out! Unfortunately, (and maybe not surprisingly) it doesn’t seem to work on a Mac.

They also have a posting area populated by folks who seem to work at Microsoft, which makes for interesting reading. It can also show just how much may never change. All kidding aside, this seems to be an interesting and fun way to learn about the behind the scenes action that we rarely see.

Now, I highlight this because this is a medium the web has seen take off, with MySpace.com and video blogs, such as youtube.com, becoming phenomenally popular. This seems to be the sort of format today's high school (and these days, even younger) girls would be willing to check out and maybe learn something. This is awesome! Oh and I’m sure guys could learn something from it as well, although probably not what Microsoft intended them to learn (guys just don’t work that way).

Chronicle of Higher Ed to Run Colloquy About Women in Computer Science

Ok, we're back from our extended holiday hiatus. We'll be catching up throughout the next day or so, but I thought I'd first post a quick link to this interesting Chronicle of Higher Education Colloquy. It's entitled "The Computer Science Clubhouse":

Only 17 percent of undergraduate computer-science degrees were awarded to women in 2004, according to the Computing Research Association, down from 19 percent in 2000. Why is the number so low, and dwindling?

Are women less attracted than men to programming, as an influential study from the late 1990s indicated? Should admissions policies and curricula be redesigned with women in mind? Or will that serve only to marginalize women?

More-recent research suggests that women avoid the field because they are discouraged as children from using or playing with technology, then discriminated against in computer-science classes and high-tech workplaces. What kinds of support systems, such as mentoring programs or alumnae networks, might solve those problems?

Claudia Morrell of the Center for Women and Information Technology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County will answer questions submitted by readers on Thursday, January 12, beginning at 1 pm. So get your comments and questions in now.

Boston Globe: In computer science, a growing gender gap

The Boston Globe has a great, fairly in-depth piece today on the declining interest of women in computer science. Reporter Marcella Bobardieri writes:

Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. In the early 1980s, it had one of the highest proportions of female undergraduates in science and engineering. And yet with remarkable speed, it has become one of the least gender-balanced fields in American society.

...

The percentage of women studying physics, already low, dropped dramatically and stayed in the single digits for decades. Eventually the physics bubble burst for men as well, and today a high percentage of the country's physicists are foreign-born.

Some computer scientists fear that they may be going in the same direction. They view the dearth of women as symptomatic of a larger failure in their field, which has recently become less attractive to promising young men, as well. Women are ''the canaries in the mine," said Harvard computer science professor Barbara J. Grosz.

In the wake of the dot-com bust, the number of new computer science majors in 2004 was 40 percent lower than in 2000, according to the Computing Research Association. The field has seen ups and downs before, and some think the numbers for men will soon improve at least a bit. But the percentage of undergraduate majors who are female has barely budged in a dozen years.

The shortage of new computer scientists threatens American leadership in technological innovation just as countries such as China and India are gearing up for the kind of competition the United States has never before faced.

Read the whole thing (also mentions the National Center for Women and Information Technology).