Mesa College will be starting a new project aimed at increasing participation by female students in technology classes and facilitate their transition into technology careers.

The 5-year program, known as CalWomenTech, will be funded by a $2 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the training for Mesa faculty and staff on how to implement the program will be provided by the Institute for Women in Trades, Technology and Science (IWITTS).

That women are underrepresented in the areas of math, science and engineering courses at colleges and universities has been a cause of much concern, debate and controversy in recent years.

In order to shed some light on the state of gender equity in technology at Mesa College, a study was conducted to evaluate the level of female participation and performance in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) classes.

“Our data clearly showed us that within the GIS classes, male students were more successful in terms of going through the class – that’s the retention-whereas a high percentage of women students dropped out in the middle of the class. In terms of the grade distribution, a bigger percentage of the male students did better in their academic performance than the women,” according to Dean Otto Lee, of the School of Business, Computer Studies and Technology.

CalTechWomen is a project designed to address such gender inequities. It is administered by IWITTS, which provides expertise in recruiting and retaining female technology students.

Mesa College applied to partner with IWITTS on the project after “they issued a request for proposals from any community college that would be interested in taking advantage of their services. We were just one of 4 community colleges that were selected for them to work with.” Lee said.

The CalTechWomen pilot project at Mesa will focus exclusively on GIS. Geographical Information Systems is software that displays a map of any type of database information which has a geographical element by relating the data to its physical location anywhere on Earth.

IWITTS was interested in collaborating with Mesa because the school’s GIS program was “just beginning and also funded by the NSF. Our GIS program is also funded by the NSF in a separate grant so that’s kind of how those two pieces got connected.” Lee explained.

The long range goal is to ultimately increase female participation and success in all technology programs on campus, and spread GIS use to areas of study that could benefit from it.

The potential student population includes working professionals, current college students in a multitude of disciplines, and high school students.

Lee says that working professionals are taking GIS classes at Mesa because the companies they work for are beginning to use the software and they need to be trained on how to use it.

There are also San Diego high schools who introduce GIS to 11th and 12th graders to prepare them for the careers of the future.

Nowadays, GIS is no longer solely the domain of geography buffs and urban planners. One way to increase retention of female students is to emphasize GIS’s broader uses in a variety of fields.

Prof. Karen Williams, who heads the GIS program at Mesa, notes, “I think it’s a good opportunity for women and maybe one they’re not even aware of.” Williams notes several examples of how students on campus use it.

She recalls a student in the medical field who was using GIS to map the incidences of avian flu so he could use that information to learn more about the how and why the disease spreads.

The software has already become commonplace in political science. “The red and blue maps you saw after the elections – that’s all done based on GIS because GIS is based on databases.” Williams said.

Prof. Becca Arnold uses GIS in her Economics Honors class. She noticed what a powerful tool it can be in understanding economic concepts like inflation rates, GDP, growth and trade surplus because the information is all visual.

“What was even more impressive was how much they (her students) enjoyed it,” said Arnold.

It is this idea that GIS is not only valuable as a source of information but also exciting and fun to use which faculty and staff hope will encourage women to embrace this growing technology.

Key faculty and staff will begin receiving training in early June.

The faculty is optimistic about how the new strategies can be used to serve students as the world continues to become increasingly technology-oriented.

“We’re just really excited about this thing.” Lee concludes. “It’s really going to be the future.”