Frances Allen is 2006 Turing Award winner
She did a lot of cool work on compiler optimizations in the 1960s, and work in the 70s on parallel systems. She’s also the first woman to receive this award since the ACM started handing them out in 1966. It’s cool that a woman finally received it, but an unfortunate comment on the state and history of our field. It’s interesting, for example, that John Cocke (who she co-authored numerous papers with) received the Turing Award fully 20 years ago. We can hope that honoring her is a sign of the slow process of change, but we’ll obviously need to continue to actively work on broadening our community.
February 28th, 2007 at 16:43
It is about that a woman has won the Turing Award, espically considering her co-author was creditied 20 years ago.
But I just discovered this: You’re the only full time male CSci professor at UMM (You & Andy vs. Diane, Jinzhu, Elena, and KK), and next year Andy will be gone and you’ll be the only guy. Hopefully this will affect the balance in the class room.
February 28th, 2007 at 19:06
Yeah, the gender distribution in our computing faculty is seriously atypical, which is pretty cool. I hadn’t thought about the fact that I’m the only full time male, but to have a majority of female faculty is pretty wildly unusual.
Unfortunately that by itself hasn’t done much of anything to help our student demographics, which are still very heavily male. At the moment our pool of majors consists almost entirely of students who come to UMM intending to major in CSci, and the demographics of our faculty has very little effect on that variable. We’re working on some things where our balance will make more of a difference, especially in trying to offer a wider variety of intro courses for non-majors that will appeal to a broader audience (dynamic web development, media computation, data visualization). Our hope (and there’s some very early evidence to support it) is that we’ll get a wider range of students in those courses, and that some of them will be sufficiently interested that they’ll continue on at some partway into our program.
We’re also involved in a number of community outreach kind of programs, many of which are specifically aimed at encouraging girls and young women, but while that sort of stuff is really important, it rarely has a clear, immediate impact on enrollments.