Her experience as a young girl interested in science inspired Professor Maria Klawe’s mission to drive cultural change in STEM education.
Professor Klawe, from Harvey Mudd College in California, one of the top science and engineering undergraduate centres in the world, told the Times Higher Education (THE) 2017 Young Universities Summit at QUT how breaking down barriers had produced remarkable results.
Focusing on mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, and engineering, Harvey Mudd has about 800 students and is known for its challenging workload. Professor Klawe is the first female president for 29 years.
“One of the things I’ve been passionate about from a very young age is making science and engineering more supportive of women,” she said.
“And that’s because when I was growing up everything I liked was reserved for men. Everything.”
After 14 years at the University of British Columbia, Canada, Professor Klawe decided she needed to be in the US to have the best chance of influencing change. She moved to Princeton University and created a strategic vision to increase diversity, later adopted for Harvey Mudd.
The plan has seen Harvey Mudd increase its percentage of female first year students from 24 per cent in 2006 to 46 per cent in 2016. The percentage of African-American first years has increased from 2 per cent to 10 per cent and Hispanic first years have risen from from 5 per cent to 22 per cent.
The changes have also been felt at a faculty level with 88 per cent of department chairs women, up from just 12 per cent.
“I get a huge amount of credit for what has happened at Harvey Mudd. I didn’t do it,” Professor Klawe said.
“The only reason this worked is because our community decided to make it work.”
To devise the strategic plan, participation from the entire university community was encouraged, including staff, students, alumni, trustees and parents. For transparency, every idea was available on a website and to ensure ideas were given a fair hearing staff were trained in “non-interruption listening protocols”.
“Imagine two thirds of your academic staff being trained to listen well. It changes your culture,” Professor Klawe said.
Key steps were introduced including diversity workshops for professional and academic staff, handwritten cards from Professor Klawe to all admitted female students, and a redesign of admissions materials.
“Every single engineering school in the US publishes a magazine three or four times a year and as dean of engineering at Princeton I would flick through the pages … there were examples where there must be 1,000 people in the magazine and none were women,” Professor Klawe said.
The road has not been without speedbumps, including overcoming the perception “increasing diversity means lowering standards”, a continuing challenge to attract African-American and Hispanic students, and some graduate experiences that suggest male-dominated industries have much work to do.
“I liken the tech industry to me taking downhill ski lessons … I think I’m doing pretty well but as soon as I get on the slopes I revert right back to my old habits,” Professor Klawe said.
“We’ve got a long way to go but my feeling is unless we change undergraduate education so we can get a truly diverse group of graduates ready to enter the workforce, we’re not going to change the workforce.”
Follow the Summit via Twitter:
#YoungUni
#THEYOUNG
Media contact:
Rob Kidd, QUT Media, 07 3138 1841, rj.kidd@qut.edu.au
After hours, Rose Trapnell, 0407 585 901, media@qut.edu.au
