Despite the difficulties that some of them have faced, nearly every undergraduate woman interviewed for this article stressed that she had found the faculty in the CS department to be welcoming and supportive.
Several CS professors indicated that encouraging more women to study the subject was among their top priorities for the future.
“It’s something that we talk about a lot,” said Associate Dean for Computer Science and Engineering J. Gregory Morrisett. “We are coordinating with a bunch of departments around the world and are trying a lot of different things in the hopes that we will uncover some of the issues and correct for them.”
Morrisett said he hoped to increase the number of female CS faculty members, which currently stands at four out of 18, in order to provide role models for female students considering CS.
He also praised the efforts of CS50 Lecturer David J. Malan ’99, who has worked to make the introductory coding class more accessible to those without a CS background. Under Malan’s tenure, CS50 has attracted record levels of female enrollment, though this has not yet translated to higher numbers of female concentrators.
CS Professor Radhika Nagpal said that while she has grown “more and more puzzled” over the gender disparity, she believes that Harvard can look to some of its peer institutions to improve female participation in CS.
In particular, she highlighted MIT—where 31 percent of CS concentrators are now female—as a school where a concerted effort to improve gender ratios in CS had been extremely successful.
“It isn’t as if there is one factor [causing the imbalance], but that isn’t a reason to give up,” Nagpal said. “I think at Harvard, we have to find a solution. We have to find one that works.”
—Staff writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
CORRECTION: April 10, 2010
An earlier version of the April 9 news article "Computer Science at Harvard Sees Large Gender Imbalance" incorrectly referred to David J. Malan '99 as a CS50 professor. In fact, he is lecturer.