Associate Professor Anu Bourgeois recently won a $60,000 grant from Northeastern University’s Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC) to fund a project titled “See Us: Women Inclusion-Directed Diagnostic Data Grant for Georgia State University Computer Science.” Established in 2019, CIC partners with colleges and universities to close the gender gap in computing by addressing and removing institutional barriers that prevent women of all races from succeeding in the field.
According to the National Science Foundation, only 18% of undergraduate computer science degrees are awarded to women, despite the fact that women account for more than half of the U.S. population. Georgia State is fertile ground for investigating this gap. The annual Taulbee Survey collects statistics on Ph.D.-granting CS departments in North America. During the 2020–2021 academic year, the survey found that 1,550 Black/African-American female students were enrolled in a bachelor's degree program in computer science at the surveyed institutions. Of these, 163 were GSU students, accounting for 10.5% of the total.
Dr. Bourgeois’ two-year grant is “diagnostic,” meaning that she will use it to investigate the reason behind the gender inequity between male and female students majoring in computer science at Georgia State. She is planning to collect large amounts of data across a wide variety of topics, ranging from who registered for what classes to what was the gender of the instructor in a specific class. Her research will focus on the first three classes in the CS pathway, with the goal of identifying a pattern that helps explain the gap between male and female CS students.
In addition to awarding diagnostic grants, CIC also offers “implementation” grants that provide funding for departments to implement practices that close the gender gap once they have collected data and are able to target relevant issues. Dr. Bourgeois intends to apply for this type of grant following the conclusion of the current project.
Dr. Bourgeois is partnering with GSU’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness, a university-wide office that supports assessment and evaluation efforts in order to increase the quality of programs, services, and operations.
Story by Ashlie Swanson