Sunday, November 6, 2011

NCWIT Trying to Increase Number of Women in Technology Field

Campus Technology (10/25/11) Tim Sohn

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) has partnered with academia and industry to improve the recruitment and retention of women in information technology (IT) and expects an additional 1,000 women to graduate with IT-related degrees next year. The program, called NCWIT Pacesetters, provides a peer group for discussing experiences, research, and results; puts on the annual NCWIT Summit on Women in IT; and offers case studies on educational reform, recruitment, and retention. Other offerings include social science research on workforce participation, education, and innovation; outreach campaigns on IT careers and education for women; and an online inventory of resources. The Pacesetters program has boosted the percentage of women computing graduates at the University of Virginia from 10 percent to 25 percent, and led to twice as many female engineer interns at Google. Meanwhile, the University of California, Santa Cruz says the program helped increase the number of female majors in computer science by 40 percent.

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