Work in progress - podcasts for recruiting and retaining female computer science majors

The minority status of women in computer science programs is well known, but some regional institutions suffer statistics that are even worse than the national averages. At Shippensburg University, only 7% of computer science undergraduate majors are female. Recently, they have banded together to form a Women in Computer Science (WiCS) organization with a unique mission. They started by researching why they are such a small minority. Our students feel a strong need to change the misperceptions that deter girls and are addressing them with a new video podcast that is targeted at girls in secondary school and designed to connect computer science topics to current issues. We are building a website around these podcasts in the hopes of creating an on-line community connecting our students to girls in secondary schools. This project has done an excellent job of creating a community for our female students clearly helping retain the few women we have. We are hoping that it will improve our recruitment of women and encourage girls to pursue computer science even if they enroll elsewhere.