Women in the Information Age

WITIA Director Jane Fountain spoke last week at “Mind the Gap,” a conference and career summit at the University of Massachusetts Amherst designed to increase the participation of women in information technology.

Professor Fountain’s panel, “Leading Experts Speak: Why women are turned off by technology and how to overcome it” brought together researchers and industry professionals to discuss the gender gap in IT education and employment. Panelists discussed the challenges of being a women in an IT field, the benefits of IT skills in today’s workplace, juggling work and family commitments, and how to attract women to the IT field.

Videos of both the panel and the day’s keynote lecture are available at the CAITE website: http://caite.cs.umass.edu

The National Science Foundation has awarded funding to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create a Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education. CAITE is a program created to design and carry out comprehensive programs to address under-representation in IT and CS education and the workforce in Massachusetts and beyond.

Under CAITE, WITIA will help to will pilot a series of outreach programs, identify best practices and disseminate, deploy, extend and institutionalize those best practices statewide and nationally. WITIA will post CAITE materials in our databases as they are developed, so be sure to check back often: http://witia.net/Resources/

Other partners in this project include: the Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative (CITI), the Boston Area Advanced Technological Education Center (BATEC), regional Louis Stokes Alliances and NSF EGEP programs, Springfield Technical Community College, Bristol Community College, and other partnerships and initiatives focused on information technology education and STEM pipeline issues.

For an article on CAITE visit here:
http://www.umass.edu/loop/talkingpoints/articles/49097.php

CAITE members: you can visit the CAITE section of WITIA here:
http://www.witia.net/caite

Welcome to the WITIA blog. Stay tuned for information about women and computer science and information technology. And contact us if you have any questions - contact@witia.net