I was reading this book and stumbled upon a very interesting take on how to encourage women to pursue tech careers:

…how can we encourage more women to pursue tech careers? Or, to change the question, how can we prevent tech careers from seeming unappealing to women? One college has found the answer. In 2006, Maria Klawe, a computer scientist and mathematician, was appointed president of Harvey Mudd College in California. At the time, only 10 per cent of the college’s computer science majors were women. The department devised a plan, aimed at luring in female students and making sure they actually enjoyed their computer science initiation, in the hopes of converting them to majors.

A course previously entitled ‘Introduction to programming in Java’ was renamed ‘Creative approaches to problem solving in science and engineering using Python’.* The professors further divided the class into groups – Gold for those with no coding experience and Black, for those with some coding experience.* They also implemented Operation Eliminate the Macho Effect, in which males who showed off in class were taken aside and told to desist. Almost overnight, Harvey Mudd’s introductory computer science course went from being the most despised required course to the absolute favourite.

That was just the beginning. Improving the introductory course obviously helped, but it was also important to ensure that women signed up for another class. The female professors took the students to the annual Grace Hopper Conference, an annual ‘celebration of women in technology’. It was an important step in demonstrating that there was nothing weird or anti-social about women working in tech. Finally, the college offered a summer of research for female students to apply their new-found talents to something useful and socially beneficial. ‘We had students working on things like educational games and a version of Dance Dance Revolution for the elderly. They could use computer technology to actually work on something that mattered,’ says Klawe.

As is often the case with nudges, they had a multiplicative effect and the movement snowballed. After the first four-year experiment, the college had quadrupled its female computer science majors in a short space of time, from ten per cent to 40 per cent. Notice that there were no quotas involved – everything was voluntary, and no one found their freedom to choose impaired. It is simply good marketing applied to a problem.