Women in Computer Science Annotated Bibliography
This is the annotated bibliography for the blog post “Women Excelling in Computer Science”. In this blog we aim to shed a light on the lack of gender diversity within the computer science profession. Sharing different ideas, as to how this lack of diversity can be solved, and how large corporations have benefited from enabling women to join their professions.
Nasser, H. E. (2019, July 16). Number of Women Lawyers At Record High But Men Still Highest Earners. Retrieved October 29, 2019, from https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/05/women-lawyers.html.
This periodical takes a deeper look into the amount of growth we have seen of women coming into the legal profession. It also talks largely about the pay gap between women and their male counterparts, but that was not the main focus of our blog, so we left that part out. It was a great way to see just how many women there used to be back in the 60’s in the legal field, and quantifies, and showcases how many more there are now. It makes the reader think “well now the amount of men to women is basically equal, now let’s start focusing on the pay”.
Legal Profession Statistics. (2019, August 5). Retrieved October 27, 2019, from https://www.americanbar.org/about_the_aba/profession_statistics/.
This organizations website provides a multitude of different statistics, and data points for all forms of diversity, and lack thereof within the legal profession. There are probably 40 different links to graphs, and data sets, that came in handy for the writing of this blog. We specifically focused on the statistics pertaining to the growth of the percentage of women getting into the legal field.
Dockterman E. Imagine If Half of All Tech Inventions and Startups Came from Women. Time.com [Internet]. 2014 May 31 [cited 2019 Oct 21];1
In the periodical it speaks about the importance of women in STEM careers, Eliana strives to demonstrate the importance of women in the tech field and their role in the development of innovative technology. She goes on to explain how many young companies ran by males can be very sexist, which potentially can sway women away from tech careers. Towards the end of the article she explains how influential women can help increase the success of the company by creating greater demographic, the contribution of women in technology can help improve innovations, as well as marketing a broader audience.
During her analysis, Eliana includes the sexism email from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, the story of Elissa Shevinsky, CEO of Glimps Labs and provides research from the University of Michigan and Cornell University stating that companies with more gender diversity are more successful. Eliana emphasizes the urgency to encourage women to study a STEM career, but also ends her article with why sexist emails from Spiegel can explain why women prefer to study career that are more welcoming to women.
Wyckoff, A.., Centurelli, R. (2018). Women in science, technology and innovation. Education Journal, (329), 13. Retrieved from
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=128005958&site=ehost-live
The author, reveals data demonstrating the lack of representation of women in technology. He continues his periodical by providing examples of innovation created by women and the percentage of patents featuring women inventors. He ends his article by urging people to participate to increase representation of women in technology careers.
This periodical can be used to demonstrate the value women bring to companies and their contribution to improve technology. We can use the examples provided as evidence for some of the innovations created by women and how it has improved our lives, this will show the importance of having women’s’ input when creating new technology.
Google’s Helping Young Girls, But How Can We Get Women in College To Code? (2014). Forbes.Com, 1. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=96897224&site=ehost-live
This articles discuss the importance of introducing women to CS at a young age, but also encouraging colleges’ to assist women who are pursuing this career. Google recently pledged $50 million To Made with Code, an organization aimed to getting a million girls exposed to CS. The article continues by emphasizing some suggestions to colleges’ that could help women who were introduced to CS at a later age not be discouraged.
Holmberg-Wright, K., & Wright, D. J. (2018). Why Gender Diversity Is Both a Challenge and an Impending Financial Growth Opportunity for the Global Technology Industry. Business Education Innovation Journal, 10(1), 51–58. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=131707510&site=ehost-live
This article discusses why women perceive technology less attractive than other fields and also gives numerous suggestions on how to increase the number of women working in the Computer Science field. All suggestions are based on data and studies.
This article can be really important for our blog: Firstly, in the introduction, it refers to studies which show that work performance within the CS field increases when there’s greater gender diversity. Secondly, we can also refer to reasons why women are underrepresented in CS.
Coder, L., Rosenbloom, J. L., Ash, R. A., & Dupont, B. R. (2009). Economic and Business Dimensions: Increasing Gender Diversity in the IT Work Force. Communications of the ACM, 52(5), 25–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/1506409.1506417
This article shows that the number of women working in the IT field has decreased over the last 30 years and gives reasons for that. The authors conducted a survey to find out more about this topic. At the end of the article, they give suggestions about what could be done to increase gender diversity based on the results of the study.
We can use this article for our introduction, where we want to state some facts about gender diversity in the MIS/CS fields. Furthermore, we can use the study to identify problem areas for women working in the IT field.
This text is about how to increase gender diversity. It also cites some studies about how gender diversity has decreased in the last years. Lots of scientific research we could use for the blog.
Konrad, A. (2018, August 15). Dating App Bumble Launches A Fund To Invest In Other Female-Founded Startups. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2018/08/15/bumble-launches-bumble-fund/#4123aba5411f.
This periodical discusses the CEO of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd, creating a fund called Bumble Bizz that will focus on granting loans to female founded startups and small businesses. This article gives some slight insight into Bumble’s founding and gives a good picture of one company making a difference and trying to bring more women into business and STEM. The periodical also briefly discusses Bumble’s founding, where Wolfe Herd began at Tinder, got involved in a sexual harassment lawsuit, split from the company and founded one of Tinder’s strongest competitors, Bumble. This would be a prime example of women excelling in the marketplace since it shows how a woman’s perspective on dating applications has become wildly successful.
Athanasopoulou, A., Moss-Cowan, A., Smets, M., & Morris, T. (2017). Claiming the corner office: Female CEO careers and implications for leadership development. Human Resource Management, 57(2), 617–639. doi: 10.1002/hrm.21887
This academic journal discusses 12 female CEOs and their advice to future women in the workplace seeking managerial/top-level positions. I highly recommend this article as it talks directly about the challenges of becoming a professional female in the workplace with aspirations of excelling in leadership roles. It mentions the drawbacks of a professional career as well as the benefits. It has been peer reviewed many times but other field professionals, provides an enormous citations page and has many graphs and statistics that go into detail about women in a strong business environment.
Specifically, the article mentions the hardships presented that women must face still being a minority in leadership roles. Male counterparts don’t have the same issues to worry about, such as being perceived as the leader of the house, so a strong career path is thought of as better suited for them. The professional woman is still seen as slightly counter-culture and in many scenarios women might have to think twice about what they say or how they act while a man’s largest concern in this area would be avoiding a talk from HR. Overall, the article is very well done and provides a wealth of knowledge and intelligent ideas that most other articles simply glance or briefly mention without providing scientific proof as well as strong anecdotes.
This article discusses how gender and cultural diversity are important to prevent mistakes in the designing of new products and how having more women in stem is becoming more crucial. They give an example of how seatbelts were made with only men in mind initially, and women refused to transport their children without better safety measures. The articles also discusses how STEM related children’s toys are becoming more common to increase children’s interests of all backgrounds to STEM. They cite a survey where 70% of girls are interested in STEM, but shy away from it later because of a lack of self confidence which mostly likely comes from the underrepresentation of women in management roles. There’s also a section where the article talks about Whitney Wolfe, the founder of Bumble, and how the app was designed with women’s interests in mind. I think this article is interesting since it brings up the point that women and other groups less represented in STEM can provide different perspectives and come up with ways to make products to appeal to a wider audience.
Machine Design. Sep2018, Vol. 90 Issue 9, p86-89. 4p. 2 Color Photographs.
Business Education Innovation Journal. Jun2018, Vol. 10 Issue 1, p51-58. 8p
HOLMBERG-WRIGHT, K.; WRIGHT, D. J. Why Gender Diversity Is Both a Challenge and an Impending Financial Growth Opportunity for the Global Technology Industry. Business Education Innovation Journal, [s. l.], v. 10, n. 1, p. 51–58, 2018. Disponível em: <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=131707510&site=ehost-live>. Acesso em: 22 out. 2019.
This article discusses how the gender gap in fields like computer science is based on psychological and societal norms and how the education system needs to be reevaluated and redesigned to increase the number of women interested in STEM. This article gives an example about how at one point, 33% of computer science majors were women, but the number has decreased due to the introduction of PCs. They make the argument that video games became male centric and since they became available to a wider audience, men felt more comfortable around computers than women. They also talk about how computer science is more associated with masculine traits like competition and money and there’s a misconception that just because women are more motivated by intrinsic values, they can’t become accomplished programmers or software developers. Women representation in management is extremely lacking; only 5% of managers in tech related fields are women so there’s not many role models young girls can look up to. The article also references how mentors tend to select those that have a similar background to them, and since most mentors in tech are men women also struggle to find good teachers. Finally, the article quotes “There is a wealth of evidence that diversity helps teams and organizations perform better in terms of innovation, creativity,
revenue, and profits. Using the talents of our full population is critical to our economic growth, corporate
productivity, and individual happiness.” This article brings up many interesting points but the only problem I have with it is it doesn’t offer many solutions to bring more women into STEM.
Badal, S. (2014). The Business Benefits of Gender Diversity. Gallup Business Journal, 4. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=95585003&site=ehost-live
This article shows the results of a study which proves that gender diversity improves a company’s performance.
Seth Stevens, Jonah Douglas, Cameron Reeves, Alberta Garcia, Florian Bodingbauer (*all members contributed equally to the final product of this blog)