Pre- to post-conference differences: Celebrations of Women in Computing

In 2004, the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) launched a series of regional conferences for women in computing, called Celebrations. Celebrations adopted several components of the well-known international conference, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC). This paper will describe the Celebrations' components and rationale for these components, based upon research into the causes for the underrepresentation of women in computing. Recently, two papers [26, 27] compared GHC's and Celebrations' common post-conference survey items for the first time, indicating that Celebrations' attendees rate identical questions about the conferences positively at a rate that meets or exceeds percents of GHC attendees. The papers' results provide important contributions to the literature of gender issues in computing, because another independent set of papers cites the advantages of attendance at GHC. Experimenters have not previously studied pre-surveys administered to either GHC's or Celebrations' attendees, nor have they compared the results of pre-surveys to post-surveys. For the first time, this paper describes pre-surveying and also post-conference, follow-up surveying at a several-months' interval after Celebrations attendance. Positive results from the follow-up surveys further extend the value of Celebrations.