Females in ITRecruitment and Retention

Sally Mc Hugh

Dept. of Information Technology and Archaeology

3BA

April 2nd 2012

Why?

• Low numbers of females in Computer related courses

What?

• Can be done to recruit

• Can be done to retain

Ireland Today

HEA Statistics: Women in Higher

Education

Computer Science:

6% NUIG to 21% UCC

Arts:

57% UCD - 66% DCU

U.S. 1989 - 2008

Gender Differences

Maths.

Sciences

72.00 74.00 76.00 78.00 80.00 82.00 84.00 86.00 88.00 90.00 92.00

Leaving Certificate 2010/11

Boys Girls

I don’t think I was good enough!

The test was crap!

Educational ObjectivesET 2020

Create a competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in Europe

15 % increase in graduates in Maths, Science and Technology

Gender imbalance in these subjects to be reduced

Evolution

Revolution

Education is where it must begin

Recruitment Reaching out to disciplines that already have a high

concentration of women

NUI Galway Arts 2011 – 63.25% female

Actively recruit

Retention

Program designed towards females’ educational needs

Role models

Motivated teachers

Peer support

Mentoring – Teaching assistants

The Future?

Universities can create changes

Understanding the underlying problems

Developing strategies

“My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men.”

Karen Sparck-Jones: Pioneer in information retrievaland natural language processing. 1935–2007

Thank you for listening