I am not from Mudd, but I went to a talk by Maria Klawe on this very topic. I feel suddenly potentially useful. Warning: this is all only from memory. I thought I had the slides somewhere, but cannot find them. I'll email Maria, and if I hear back from her, I'll pass it on.
First off, here's the abstract for her talk:
Begin abstract
In 2006, much like at many other institutions, about 10% of HMC’s CS majors were female. At that time only a third of HMC’s students were female, but CS was an aberration. About 20% of the Physics majors and close to 30% of the engineering majors were female. Four years later 42% 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.
End abstract
She emphasised that they tried to change how their first year program was run, with more cooperative group work. She was big on how they did a lot of work to try and get rid of the "macho" attitude among their undergrads in early courses - by "macho" she seemed to mean some sort of arrogant hackerish programmer attitude. She mentioned a bunch of mentorship programs for female undergrads, and programs to help undergrads get to conferences like Grace Hopper.
But! A couple friends and I were bothered by something else she said they did: they changed their undergrad admissions so as to admit more women to computer science in first year. Because they are a small, elite college they were able to do this without affecting the quality of their students, she felt. I thought that probably this was what made most of the difference, but that's only my opinion.
Hm, thank you!
The article mentions breaking the intro to programming class into programming for science, programming for beginners, and programming for people with previous experience, and I can imagine that separating a class of arrogant hackers from freshmen who are interested in learning about computers, but changing the admissions process seems like it could easily divert female students from other schools, which is the sort of thing that I was worried about really.
I'd like to know how the admissions process was actually changed. (And how many women with computer sci interests had been rejected in previous years)
I don't see what's the relevance of the number of females or males inside the computer science programs. It really shouldn't matter.
I recently ran across the following link:
A Campus Champion for Women in Computer Science
Which discusses a new president at Harvey Mudd College, and specifically her work in making the computer science major more accessible to women. This seems neat and interesting except... barely any details are provided whatsoever.
They mention that the introductory computer science course was split into different courses, one of which is taught in Python. Looking at Maria Klowe's webpage on Harvey Mudd she references that these steps were taken in a three part plan, and says "I encourage you to read more" but there are no obvious links on the page to any specifics.
Is anyone from Harvey Mudd that knows more or how to find out more? For example, did the increase in female computer scientists go along with an increase in the size of the program (as is implied) or was there a displacement of male computer scientists? Is the success limited to the one department, or are other engineering and science majors picking up women? I noticed the front page mentioning that Harvey Mudd was recently named the top engineering school in the US, so presumably the gains don't result from "dumbing down" the program, but I'd like to see more information.