Academic Institutions - Changing the Culture of Technology

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is an organization committed to change. Last week their Board of Trustees met in California, with the intent of informing their board of trustees and academic leadership on a number of critical topics. As part of their overall multi day agenda, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology met with them Friday morning.

Forty people from RIT met with myself, Alan Fisher, the co-chair of our advisory board, who is well known for his work on Unlocking the Clubhouse and most of ABI's senior staff.

I believe passionately that in order to change the culture of technology, it is important to actively engage with diverse organizational participants including students, faculty, as well as the institutional leadership. We were pleased to take the time to meet, to provide information from both research and practice that we understand because of our work.

RIT has been an active participant in many of our programs, they bring students to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and often sponsor the conference. It impresses me that the institutional leadership is reaching out to ABI to understand better what works, and understand the research.

We talked about all of the issues that academic institutions are grappling with - how to attract female students as undergraduates and graduates, how to retain students once they show interest in engineering and computer science disciplines, and topics such as how important are female faculty role models to keeping students (it is important).

There is nothing more powerful than participating in a productive conversation like the one that RIT engaged with us on Friday, knowing that there will be follow through. It makes me optimistic about the future.