Broadening Participation

The Allen School is a community that celebrates and values differences among its members.

We focus on building a community that allows all our students, staff, and faculty to achieve their full potential. Our school is diverse in race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, ability/disability, age, socioeconomic background, academic experience, veteran status and many more dimensions than we can list here. Our commitment to cultivating a welcoming and supportive environment for people of all backgrounds is a fundamental part of our mission as a public educational institution.

This commitment is specifically important to our work in computer science and engineering. As we educate new generations of scholars and engineers, our ability to draw upon the experiences of people of all backgrounds makes us more effective at identifying and solving important problems while ensuring that computation serves all members of our society.

How Do We Broaden Participation?

As leading teachers and scholars of computer science and engineering, we take concrete actions, such as the following, to work towards an environment and a field in which all members can thrive:

We reduce bias in admissions and hiring;
We build pedagogy and policies to create an excellent and welcoming atmosphere in which all students can learn;
We broaden participation in computing through outreach to communities that are underrepresented in the field;
We consider many perspectives and stakeholders in the research questions we ask and the methods we use to answer them; and
We insist on a robust and professional intellectual environment where debate and diverse views can be expressed vigorously and free of personal attacks.

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Making Good on Our Commitment

The Allen School’s work to broaden participation includes the investment of resources and the efforts of many individuals and groups. Faculty, staff, and students incorporate this mission into their teaching, research, and work. Collaboration with other UW offices and external organizations are crucial to our success. Investment from donors and industry partners support our efforts.

Below we provide a high level view of our work. For a detailed look at our efforts, see our Latest Initiatives and Ongoing Activities.

Engaging Women in the Field

We have made significant strides in the Allen School in encouraging more women to pursue computer science and engineering. One-third of our CS bachelor’s degrees are now earned by women (significantly above the national average) and twenty-five percent of our Ph.D. students are women. Our progress has earned national recognition: in 2011 we became an NCWIT Pacesetter School, and in 2015 we earned the inaugural NCWIT NEXT Award grand prize for our success in recruiting and retaining women in undergraduate computer science by growing “an inclusive, welcoming community that spans beyond the walls of the university and has demonstrably advanced women’s meaningful participation in computing.” We also have made great strides in our effort to recruit and support women faculty members, including rising stars in computer vision, robotics, privacy and security, machine learning, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, and programming languages and software engineering.

Nonetheless, we know that women in computing continue to endure experiences that challenge their place and success in our field. We work actively to counter such experiences, both in the Allen School and more broadly, while acknowledging that we have more work to do. We are proud of the women in our community who give voice to these challenges and shine a light on where more progress is needed. This September 2018 Seattle Times feature is a particularly remarkable collection of perspectives from six members of our community.

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Empowering People with Disabilities

The Allen School actively works to increase access to CS education and careers for people with disabilities. The AccessComputing Alliance enables students with disabilities to pursue computer science degrees by providing guidance, resources, mentoring opportunities, and funding. The Alliance assists higher education institutions and employers to develop inclusive programs and follow best practices in recruiting and supporting students with disabilities. Allen School professor Richard Ladner has led our efforts, and has received numerous awards in recognition of his leadership on accessibility, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

A significant expansion of this effort has recently taken place with the launching of the University of Washington Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE), led by an interdisciplinary team whose mission is to make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology.

We are proud to align our culture with the University of Washington’s commitment to equal opportunity and accessibility:

The University of Washington reaffirms its policy of equal opportunity regardless of race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, or status as a disabled veteran or Vietnam era veteran in accordance with University policy and applicable federal and state statutes and regulations. The University of Washington is committed to providing access and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities.

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Increasing Our Focus on Other Underrepresented Groups

In recent years we in the Allen School have significantly increased our focus on other under-represented groups at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

In 2016 the Hopper-Dean Foundation challenged us to extend our long-standing focus on women at the undergraduate level to groups such as economically disadvantaged students. The Hopper-Dean Foundation Collaboration (HDFC) originally involved the University of Washington, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford. In 2019 Cornell, Georgia Tech, and Howard University joined in a second phase of the collaboration (and Stanford was dropped). One key element of our commitment has been extensive involvement with the STARS Engineering Scholars program. We have also transitioned our K-12 outreach programs from “broad and shallow” to “narrow and deep,” launching significant engagements with schools that have a high proportion of students from populations that we particularly seek to reach. Our Allen School Ambassadors are heavily engaged in these and other outreach efforts.

At the graduate level, in 2017 the Allen School and 10 other top computer science graduate programs formed the LEAP (diversifying LEAdership In the Professoriate) Alliance, which brings together the small number of graduate programs responsible for producing the majority of the computer science professoriate with individuals and organizations that understand how to recruit, retain, and develop students from underrepresented groups, with the goal of creating a network that can broaden participation in the professoriate in the field. Participation in the LEAP Alliance has stimulated a significant expansion of our efforts in recruiting and retaining graduate students.

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Who We Are