Women and Girls of Color in Computing: Exploring Current Trends, Emerging Opportunities, and Strategies for Meaningful Impact

Women of color comprise a critical segment of the United States population, yet they remain underrepresented in computing education and the workforce and often overlooked in data collection and reporting, research, and interventions to increase diversity in computing. This panel of researchers will provide an overview of the current challenges facing women of color, and highlight initiatives to develop, test, and scale strategies to improve the outcomes of women of color in computing. This panel aims to increase audience understanding of the challenges and opportunities, while inspiring the audience to take action and apply emerging insights and strategies to their local contexts, in order to improve outcomes for women of color. The intention is that this panel is not merely intended to highlight programs, but more importantly, to begin to strategically, scientifically, and collaboratively improve the outcomes for women and girls of color across the computing pipeline. The intended audience for this panel include K-12 computing educators, computing faculty, education nonprofit leaders, researchers and the philanthropic community.