Inspiring Women Undergraduates Hannah M. Dee GIPSA lab, INPG 961 rue de la Houille Blanche, BP46, 38402 Grenoble, France hmd@hannahdee.eu Roger D. Boyle School of Computing University of Leeds Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK roger@comp.leeds.ac.uk ABSTRACT This paper describes the conception, motivation, organiza- tion, and evaluation of a national, one-day event for women students of computing: the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that such events have value for women students of computing. We hope to show that through introducing these undergraduate women to high profile role models we can inspire them, and that through providing the students with a forum for presenting their own work, we can be inspired by them ourselves. We believe this is a successful and economical model for an event which could be re-used in other countries or regions. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.m [Computers and education]: Miscellaneous General Terms Human factors Keywords Women in computing, Gender issues, Motivation 1. INTRODUCTION This paper describes the conception, motivation, orga- nization, and evaluation of a national, one-day event for women students of computing which is now established as an annual event. The problems facing women in computing and related disciplines are well-documented, with the pro- portion of women in technical roles and studying technical subjects hovering around 15% in the UK[7]. This gender imbalance is linked to recruitment problems, drop-out rates (the so called ‘leaky pipeline ’ [4, 6]), a perception of com- puting as a macho subject, and isolation for those women who do choose to work or study within the field. Attempts to investigate and to address these problems have been initiated in many countries and internationally. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. ITiCSE’10, June 26–30, 2010, Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey. Copyright 2010 ACM 978-1-60558-820-9/10/06 ...$10.00. The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), in con- junction with the WGBH Educational Foundation, have been investigating in depth the perception of computing with their “New Image for Computing” project [1]. The BCS (British Computer Society) with trade body Intellect and government office e-Skills have carried out a major survey in the UK looking at the representation of women across computing careers and education [7]. Various projects offer grant support to women in technical fields (e.g. Anita Borg fellowships from Google [3], or the Society of Women Engi- neers [2]). Networking organisations exist to support women at the level of individual companies (BT Women’s network, Google women engineers) national (e.g. BCSWomen in the UK; Frauen Inform in Germany), and international (e.g. Girl Geek Dinners, IEEE women in engineering, ACM-W) levels. Another type of intervention is that of the conference or colloquium. These events bring together women working in or studying computing and serve the purpose of provid- ing networking opportunities and exposure to role models. This paper describes the conception, aims and evaluation of just such an event: the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium (referred to hereafter as The Lovelace for brevity). This is an UK annual event aimed at an often neglected part of the community: undergraduate and taught Masters students. It is now entering its third year. 1.1 Related events, their aims and impact This section provides a brief overview of existing events with a similar aim to ours. We emphasise UK events here as the Lovelace is aimed at a UK audience. The Grace Hopper: This is the largest women-in-technology event in the world, and occurs annually. It is aimed at industry, students, academics, and high school teach- ers. Last year’s event had over 1500 attendees. The London Hopper Colloquium: This is a one-day event for UK based women postgraduate research students, held in London each spring. Last year’s had 60 atten- dees W-tech: Held for the first time in 2009, W-tech was con- ceived as a UK-based event along the lines of the USA’s Grace Hopper, but oriented strongly towards the work- force with multi-track professional development ses- sions throughout the day. The 2009 event had 700 attendees. Whilst it was clearly viewed as a success 43