A few weeks back, I started teaching a new class at OSU-Cascades in Computer Graphics, a topic I know well, professionally. There was an interesting thing about this class, which was that out of the 7 students, one of them was a woman. I noticed this, in passing, and thought it was cool, although I didn't really have time to check in with her personally and find out what her deal was. I've always bemoaned the fact that there weren't more women in computer science. It sucks, for multiple reasons: we don't get the benefit of a different point of view, it makes the social environment a good bit more stilted, and it makes it harder to write games for women, not to mention that it just kind of feels wrong. While my primary goal is to educate everybody, given the chance, I'd love to have a positive effect on that gender imbalance.
This week, that woman dropped my class. I haven't had a chance to talk to her about why. I don't know what her situation was. In addition to just being really busy teaching the class, I was dealing with an issue involving one of the other students who has a learning disability and I guess I just wasn't focused on what was happening with her. Looking back on the first couple of weeks, I can tell that there was a tendency for her to kind of "fade into the background". I definitely don't feel that I did anything wrong, certainly, as an educator - but I'm also left with the lingering sense that I could have done better. To be fair, every student comes to the class with unique challenges, and there's only so much I can do. It's always been the case that students who are proactive about their own education get better service from professors, and she wasn't proactive. At the same time, I think that I could have done better. There were a few classroom discussions where I suddenly noticed that she wasn't really participating. Maybe she felt uncomfortable. Or maybe the class was just really hard (it is). The point is I have no idea, and that makes me feel like there was a lost opportunity here. I can't see it as a coincidence that, of the 7 students, the only one to drop (so far anyway) was the only woman.
I'll be reaching out to my boss at OSU-Cascades, and other people I know and trust, but if any of you have any ideas/thoughts/suggestions - especially from any women computer scientists in the audience - I'm all ears.
