Women in the ((Hard) Social) Sciences Initiative

Background

The last decade or so has seen a fantastic push for increasing women's participation in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields.  The same time period has seem a sharp shift in the prominence of the more quantitative social sciences.  Network science, big data, game theory, cognitive neuro-social science are just a few of the exciting areas that constitute the "where the action is" in the social sciences.

These subfields are also the ones in which women are most radically unrepresented.  One thing this translates into is fantastic opportunities for Mills women we could train to work in these areas.  Another thing is the chance for Mills women to have a real impact on the direction of these fields.

Although the effort to increase women's participation in the STEM fields is laudable in every way, it is arguable that more women in chemistry won't radically change the things chemists study.  By contrast, one COULD speculate that in the social sciences more women practicing in these cutting edge fields might have a significant impact on the kinds of problems we study as well as the methods we use to study them.

Proposal

Establish a program for the promotion of women's participation in the "hard" social sciences.  The program might be a track that cut across the existing social science majors with a few special seminars, a group of faculty advising the students, and a few new courses (including the "Mathematical Social Sciences" course Ryan piloted a few years back).  We'd have a budget for bringing to campus women and men social scientists doing the latest and coolest thing on the cutting edge.  We'd exploit Mills excellence in teaching mathematics to build a cohort of mathematically adept social science majors.  We'd build bridges to the interdisciplinary computer science masters program (see this post) to have our students connecting there.  One aspect of the program would build on "learn to code" efforts going on internationally.  We would make connections with tech firms in Silicon Valley that have branched out into social science work (Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc.).  We would make connections with emerging efforts at the GSB that would resonate with this.

Coursework

• Calculus, linear algebra, and probability/statistics
• Introduction to mathematical social science
• Introduction to economics
• Advanced introduction to social science
• Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
• Geographic Information Systems
• Learning to code
• Discrete math
• Agent models in the Social Sciences
• Introductory probability, econometrics
• Network analysis
• Modeling and simulation

Building the Pipeline

Graduate programs in these areas are keenly aware at the underrepresentation of women in their ranks.  Those of us in contact with practitioners at research universities will work to cultivate relationships in which Mills is the supplier of just the candidates they are looking for.  During the first several years of the program we will specifically strategize on the sorts of placements we want to make happen.