Equity Articles

This is a gathering place for articles on equity in computing, addressing the issue of why the number of female, Black, Native American, and Latino (and other intersectionalities such as non-binary) students and workers in industry do not mirror their proportions in the underlying population.

Students do just as well in blended online/face-to-face classes as they do in traditional classrooms, however students who complete fully online courses tend to do quite poorly on subsequent tests of academic knowledge.

Online instruction was found to significantly exacerbate the achievement gap [between White and Latino community college students], with Latino students experiencing a nine percentage point lower success rate, grades that average two-tenths of a grade point lower, and withdrawal rates over twice as high, as Latino students in face-to-face sections of the same classes.

Talks about a "growth-mindset" vs. a "fixed-mindset."  U.T. Austin has implemented a one-time 30 minute intervention that addresses stereotype threat (belonging) and a growth mindset (ability), where students see others like them talking about their own struggles, and then the students write a mentoring letter to future students. This cut the community college math drop-out rate in half for these students. 

Gives results on how a one hour intervention drastically improved the number of otherwise at-risk students scoring in the top quarter of their class. (Work by David Yeager and Greg Walton.)   

Freeman is the President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).  He describes the Meyerhoff Scholars Program launched in 1988, originally designed to increase the number of African Americans pursuing natural-sciences and engineering (NSE) doctorates.  At the time UMBC was 85% white.  The program is built on four pillars: 1. Setting high expectations; 2. Fostering a strong sense of community through student cohorts living together; 3. Academic support including a summer "Bridge Program" before freshman year, involvement in faculty research internships; 4. Evaluation through data gathering.  UMBC is now first among predominantly white institutions and second overall in the number of African Americans it educates who go on to earn NSE doctorates.  

Underrepresentation in the design of computer systems leads to problems such as false positives on airport security screening systems for women.  One argument to help fix this is to fix the educational pipeline.  The article describes the opinions of New York University faculty member Amy Webb, who indicates that one danger of the pipeline focus could be that we increase diversity and end up with tokenization, but don't address the underlying need to improve critical thinking.  Charles Isbell, the executive director of Georgia Tech's Constellations center is quoted as saying “Are we interested in diversity, or are we interested in integration?” The integration of women, people of color, and other underrepresented voices would mean that the behavior of the entire industry would change as a result of their presence in that community. “Diversity is just membership,” Isbell said. “Integration is influence, power, and partnership.”  Isbell goes on to opine that the argument for full representation in computing "must shift from an economic imperative to a moral one."

See the 55 minute Frontline video on PBS (also on Vimeo) of Jane Elliott's "Blue Eyes Brown Eyes" experiment done on her third graders in 1968, or read the transcript.

See this 1 minute video of Jane Elliott asking a large group of white people if they would be willing to trade places with a black person.

Equality vs Equity