How to attract girls into the science-major pipeline

JUL 15, 2011

Physics Today

Chronicle of Higher Education : Nancy Linde manages educational outreach for WGBH, Boston’s PBS and NPR stations. In a commentary for the Chronicle, she argues that scientists who want girls to become science majors should adopt the practices of professional marketers. WGBH recently teamed up with the Association for Computing Machinery to form New Image for Computing, an initiative to transform the image of computing among girls. Thanks to funding from NSF, Linde and her colleagues worked with New York–based marketing firms and discovered that some of their assumptions about outreach were mistaken. She distills her experience in three lessons:

Whether your project is small or large, know your audience. And you don’t need to hire a marketing firm from Manhattan. For the price of a round of snacks, you can convene a couple of focus groups and gather a wealth of data.
Test every communication document, whether print or online, with your target audience. Then redesign and test, test again.
Assume nothing. One of the classic missteps in trying to attract students to computer science lies in the fact that people in the field are often the ones who design and write the communication brochures and recruitment pamphlets. They often assume, misguidedly, that the messages that resonate with them will also appeal to their target audience. That is rarely the case.

Following those principles, New Image for Computing created Dot Diva , a website of resources for girls who want to learn about computing. As if to underline lesson 2, the name of the website was not the one Linde and her fellow team members favored. It was the name that girls said they liked the best.