Overview
There is no question that computer science has a gender problem: women account for less than 20% of CS BA/BS recipients, and hold an even smaller proportion of graduate degrees (source). I believe that the solution to this problem is two-fold: mentorship and visibility. Seeing female computer scientists, and especially being taught and mentored by them, has been incredibly important to my educational path. I hope to play a similar role to girls and young women in my community.
To this end, I am active with She Is Code, a WoC-run non-profit serving girls and other youth who are under-represented in computing. I am also co-president (and co-founder) of Northwestern's Graduate Women in Computing Group.
She Is Code
She Is Code offers girls (ages 9-17) in the Evanston, IL community a chance to learn about technology. As a volunteer instructor, I work with the executive director to develop and present curriculum for one-off events and longer, ongoing sessions. One of our most successful projects was Code the Hood, a summer project in which middle school students learned website design, html basics, and brand management, and put their new skills to action by creating websites for local businesses. Other She Is Code activities have included app creation for Evanston-area nonprofits, mini hackathons, and college campus visits.
Graduate Women In Computing
I co-founded the Graduate Women in Computing group at Northwestern in the fall of 2018 to fill a niche I found missing during my years as a junior graduate student: a community and support system for the (too few) women in the computer science PhD program. Approximately 15 female-identifying PhD students, postdocs, faculty, and research staff attend our monthly lunches and about 10 students attend our quarterly happy hours. Before GWiC, I didn't know we had so many women! Interested Northwestern students can join the GWiC listserv, or email Jamie Gorson or me for more information.
While GWiC's primary role is to support PhD students, I hope to expand its breadth to include a mentorship program with undergraduate women. I previously founded a mentorship program with the undergraduate Women in Computing group (in spring 2016), but with no centralized way to recruit graduate student mentors, the program quickly became intra-undergraduate. Now that GWiC is fully formed, I hope that we will be able to integrate back into the WiC mentorship program to give our undergrads access to more potential role models.