Momentum: Accelerating Equity in Computing and Technology

Our work at Momentum is inspired by the reality that, despite growing demand for a technologically-trained workforce and increasing popularity of tech majors and careers, women and people of color remain marginalized in tech fields, with many equity gaps actually becoming larger with time.

Momentum aims to accelerate equity in computing and technology through the generation of new knowledge about what works (and what does not) in diversifying the tech workforce, with a special focus on educational pathways.

Simply put, it is critical to achieve greater Momentum.

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Project

Visualizing Enrollment and Degree Attainment Data to Support BPC Efforts

UCLA’s Momentum research team has received funding from the National Science Foundation to engage with computing departments to support their BPC efforts. This project aims to provide participating computing departments with visualizations of enrollment and degree attainment trends of their most recent five academic years. In addition to building data visualizations by gender and by race, our team offers other nuanced ways to at these data such as incorporating marginalized and intersectional visualizations. This project consists of three phases – data collection, data analysis, and data presentation.

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Project

Collaboration with the Center for Inclusive Computing

The project achieved an impressive survey response rate of 25% in the baseline survey administration, with over 9,000 student across 16 research universities in the United States taking the survey. As an emerging area of technology, a larger proportion of men (32%) compared to women (24%) computing students indicated extreme interest in AI, a sign that more work must be done to promote this area to women to ensure a diverse and inclusive AI workforce.

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