Categorizing Interventions: Adapting the USI Model to CS Education

I'm interested in studying diversity initiatives in CS education -- and in doing so I consider it helpful to have a model of the different types of diversity initiatives that are used to recruit/retain women and other underrepresented groups in CS. But how can we come up with a useful model? This blog post is what I've come up with so far -- where I started (explicit and implicit interventions) and where I recently arrived to (adapting the USI model of public health interventions to this context). It's a work in progress and I'd love feedback.

Explicit and Implicit Interventions

First, I want to walk you through how I have mostly been thinking about diversity initiatives. I currently categorize them like so:

• Explicit interventions: these target women (or other groups) and are explicit in their purpose. For example:
  • Departmental women-in-CS clubs at many universities
  • The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and similar conferences
  • Mentorship programmes for women in CS, like CRA-W's
  • Outreach initiatives like Gr8Girls and Girlsmarts
  • Grassroots bootcamps/workshops like Black Girls Code and Ladies Learning Code
  • Awards/scholarships/grants for women, like the Anita Borg Scholarship
  All of these both are intended for women/girls, and in the process, the women/girls participating know the intervention is for women/girls.
• Implicit interventions: these are stealthy -- they are open to everybody and do not advertise the goal of supporting women in CS. Instead these are approaches which are known to benefit women disproportionately (and may also benefit dominant groups). For example:
  • A CS professor uses pair-programming and peer instruction in their class, and randomly calls on students in a structured fashion -- all are known to disproportionately benefit female students -- but the professor does not tell her students she is doing this for the female students' sake.
  • A CS professor has their students write a value-affirming essay as an assignment at the beginning of term -- this is known to help women overcome stereotype treat in male-dominated disciplines.
  • A CS department provides a mentorship programme to all students.
  • A university mandates that all students need to take CS, and its CS department provides multiple, engaging, versions of CS1 that are tailored to different students' interests, à la Harvey Mudd.
  • A conference switches to using blind review of its submissions, which is known to disproportionately benefit women.

The implicit interventions have a fairly different feel to them. For one thing, they tend not to just help women -- these can also disproportionately help students of colour, students of low SES backgrounds, LGBTQ+ students, etc. These interventions change the system, rather than give underrepresented groups like women a buffer in an unwelcoming system.

Computer Science as a Lake

Imagine your CS department is a lake.

The fauna of your lake are primarily fish and frogs. Normal lakes in your biome tend to have a food chain where about half of the predators are frogs and the other half are fish.

Back in the 80s, the predators in your lake's ecosystem used to be 40% frogs. But then the frogs started dying, or leaving, or not hatching, or whatever else caused their population to plummet. Now you're at 25% frogs. And even though it looks like the fish are doing fantastically, there's less of them than there should be.