Programmatic efforts encouraging women to enter the information technology workforce

ABSTRACT

For over a decade the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been supporting projects designed to improve opportunities for women in computing. From an initial emphasis on increasing the number of women in graduate school studying computer science and engineering, NSF's current emphasis has broadened to include research studies examining the underlying reasons why women are underrepresented in the information technology (IT) workforce. This paper describes the recent history of NSF's activities in this area and the subsequent emergence of a research portfolio addressing the underrepresentation issue.

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