The Real Projects for Real Clients Course (Rprcc) Initiative Recruiting Young Women Into and Retaining Them in Computing-Related Majors: an Initiative Based Upon 35 Years of Psychology Research

The Real Projects for Real Clients Course (RPRCC) Initiative
Recruiting Young Women Into and Retaining Them in Computing-Related Majors: An Initiative Based Upon 35 Years of Psychology Research David Klappholz Stevens Institute of Technology davidk6@gmail.com
Gender equity in computing has long been a national goal advanced by those concerned with fairness and by those who know that the female point of view improves the design and development of software systems. Unfortunately, though, the percentage of young women entering computing-related majors keeps falling, and the female dropout rate is higher than the very high male dropout rate. The intellectual underpinning of the RPRCC Initiative is a 35-year psychological Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) that followed 3000+ MPYs from middle school into middle age. SMPY’s mandate was to determine how to best educate MPYs in order to maximize their success in STEM careers. Along the way SMPY discovered that: • absent mitigating constraints, MPY females choose STEM fields involving organic things, i.e., fields involving people, helping people, etc. This explains the current gender equity in medicine, the near gender equity in biology and many of its variants, and the majority-female participation in the social sciences. • female MPYs have considerably higher verbal skills than MPY males, accounting for their preference for inter-personal interaction, rather than solo work, and for the current gender balance in law. • absent mitigating constraints, MPY males choose STEM fields involving inorganic things, i.e., fields involving machines, abstractions etc., accounting for the gender imbalance in computing, engineering, and physics. So, one might ask, what is the point of an initiative to recruit young women into and to retain them in computing-related undergraduate majors? The answer is that only about 30% of the typical software development project (person-hours, etc.) involves solo inorganic work, i.e.,... [continues]

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