CCWE: Canadian Committee On Women In Engineering

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Annotated Bibliography
"More Than Just Numbers: Report of the Canadian Committee on Women in Engineering." CCWE: Canadian Committee on Women in Engineering, (1992): Report GST 108162025. Web.
CCWE formed in 1990 "to uncover the social and cultural barriers responsible for the under-representation of women in engineering and to design bridges that will bring them as full participants into the profession." The Committee's mission was reinforced by a predicted shortage of engineers in Canada by 2000, and given further impetus by the murder, in 1989, of 13 female engineering students at École Polytechnique in Montreal. The report relied heavily on the personal testimony of women already in the profession, and makes a large number of specific recommendations,
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“The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline.” (1997): http://www.mines.edu/fs_home/tcamp/cacm/paper.htm An overview of the decline in the percentages of degrees in computer science awarded to women since 1984. Provides a definition of the pipeline, and finds that computer science departments in engineering schools award fewer bachelors degrees in CS to women than do departments in colleges of arts and sciences. Also notes an overall increase in the numbers of students majoring in computer science in 1996 and offers some preliminary explanations.

Clarke, V. & Teague, G.J. “Characterizations of Computing Careers: Students and Professionals Disagree.” Computers & Education 26(4) (1996): 241-246.
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Found members of first two groups had very stereotypical views of computer science work (with an emphasis on individual programming). These views did not agree at all with the professionals' descriptions of their jobs. The job description of the professionals matched what the female students said they wanted in a job and why they weren't choosing computer science.

Davies, A.R., Klawe, M., Ng, M., Nyhus, C., Sullivan, H. “Gender Issues in Computer Science Education.” (2000): http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/NISE/News_Activities/Forums/Klawepaper. html

Presents an overview of the literature on women's and girls' lack of participation in technology. Then introduces the "SWIFT" program - an umbrella project for several efforts aimed at increasing girls' and women's participation. Projects described include a career survey;
E-GEMS - educational software designed to be gender-inclusive; the Virtual Family software designed to introduce Java programming in an appealing way; several outreach initiatives; and the ARC program for retraining adult women for entry into IT careers. Note that this research was done in Vancouver, British Columbia and that some of the results presented (particularly those looking at computer science major and employment trends) may not apply to

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