Perspectives on Women in Computer Science"
Panelists:
-Professor Claire Cardie
(PhD University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1994)
Member of the faculty, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University. Coordinator of Undergraduate Programs in Information Science. Founding member of the Women's Mentorship Program in Computer Science at Cornell University. Research includes: developing corpus-based techniques for understanding and extracting information from natural language texts. cardie@cs.cornell.edu
-Priyanka Nishar '03
(Bachelor of Science candidate, College of Engineering, Cornell University)
President of the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates. Member of the Society of Women Engineers. Attendee of the 2002 Grace Hopper Conference "Celebration of Women in in Computing". Founding member of the Women's Mentorship Program in Computer Science at Cornell. pan4@cornell.edu
-Professor Rosemary Paradis
(Ph.D. SUNY, Binghamton, 1998)
Member of the faculty, Department of Computer Science, Ithaca College. Research engineer at Lockheed Martin. Co-author of "What is Computing? The perceptions of university computing students," presented at The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Vancouver, 10-12 October 2002: www.cs.wits.ac.za/~vashti/sem/CGPT02GHC.html. Research includes: gender and computer ethics, artificial intelligence, learning systems and neural networks. Currently working on projects in computer vision and image understanding. rparadis@ithaca.edu
-Roselyn Teukolsky
(MS Mathematics Education, Cornell University, 1976)
Mathematics and AP computer science teacher, Ithaca High School. Cornell Computer Science summer instructor: CS 211; CS 212; and CS 410. Author of Barron's review book: "How to Prepare for the AP Computer Science Exam (C++)", 2001. Java review book pending 2003 publication. rteuk@astro.cornell.edu
-Linda Jojo
(MS Industrial Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1992)
Chief Information Officer, General Electric, Silicones Division ($1.3 billion). Formerly Global HR Systems Leader for GE and Systems Analyst at Digital Equipment Corporation. Active member of GE Women's Network. linda.jojo@gesm.ge.com
Panel Moderator:
-Vicky Weissman,
BS '96, MEng '99 (PhD Candidate, Computer Science, Cornell University)
Founding member of the Women's Mentorship Program in Computer Science at Cornell. Research interests include: using logic to state and reason about security policies. vrw1@cornell.edu
Proposed talking points for the panel: Panelists will not make formal presentations but instead will give a brief summary about their own background, then will be asked to address various points which will be introduced by the moderator. Here are a few examples of points that may be discussed:
Misinformation about women in CS (see "myths" below) What are the barriers that are preventing more women from choosing computing related majors? What attracts women to the field to begin with? Examples of disrespect and how to deal with it: a few male students walk out of a section being taught by a woman, saying "I didn't want to be taught by a girl." some male students use pointed and disparaging language when referring to women students, as if to say "You don't belong here." How do women deal with bias, sexism, and other barriers to success? Positive actions for change: How professors (both men and women) can help Mentorship works, how can we improve the mentorship network? Women in leadership/teaching roles
Myths about computing include: Men are better suited or better prepared to study computer science (research actually shows the opposite!) Computer science is only about programming You need to know a lot about computers and arcane programming jargon to be able to understand and make progress in the field The study of computing is impersonal and doesn't involve real people or human problems.