In 2006, much like at many other institutions, about 10% of HMC's CS majors were female. At that time only about a third of HMC's students were female, but CS was an aberration. About 20% of Physics majors and close to 30% of the engineering majors were female. Four years later, 40% of HMC's CS majors were female, exactly the same percentage as the whole HMC student body. This talk describes how the CS department accomplished this change, and our efforts to share our approaches more broadly with middle and high school girls.
Maria Klawe began her tenure as Harvey Mudd College’s first female president in 2006. Prior to joining HMC, she served as dean of engineering and professor of computer science at Princeton University. Klawe joined Princeton from the University of British Columbia where she served in various roles from 1988 to 2002. Prior to UBC, Klawe spent eight years with IBM Research in California and two years at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. (1977) and B.Sc. (1973) in mathematics from the University of Alberta. Klawe is a member of the board of Microsoft Corporation, Broadcom Corporation and the nonprofit Math for America, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a trustee for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and a member of both the Stanford Engineering Advisory Council and the Advisory Council for the Computer Science Teachers Association.