Amy and I are long-time supporters of the Boulder International Film Festival. The 2019
Bias, one of the documentaries that we helped fund, is making its Colorado Premier and showing on Saturday, March 2,
Robin Hauser, the director, is spectacular. Amy and I supported her previous moving Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, which was dynamite, incredibly informative, and very accessible.
I expect Bias to be even better. I encourage you to buy a ticket and go see it at the BIFF 2019.
On Saturday I went to two films at the Boulder International Film Festival – Code: Debugging the Gender Gap and A Good American. Both were excellent and worth watching, but Code was special for me as its an issue I’ve been helping work on for over a decade.
When I joined the National Center for Women & Information Technology board as the chair in 2005, it was a nascent organization and the issue of the small number of women in computer science, while often talked about, wasn’t well understood. Today, not only is the issue well understood, but many of the solutions are clear and being talked openly about, such as in the article At Harvey Mudd College, the Ratio of Women in Computer Science Increased from 10% to 40% in 5 Years
While there is still a ton of work to do, I asserted at a recent NCWIT board meeting that I felt we were at a tipping point and we’d start to see rapid improvement on the number of women in computer science in the next decade. Movies like Code make me optimistic that not only are we figuring out what is going on, but we are getting the word out and having some real impact on the issue.