0 Tapia Conference - Portland, Oregon

Over the next several days, I am attending the Richard Tapia Conference for Diversity in Computing. "The Tapia 2009 Conference is aimed at providing a supportive networking environment for under-represented groups across the broad range of computing and information technology, from science to business to the arts to infrastructure."

I am looking forward to networking, meeting other people who 'look like me' in computing and attending the sessions. Particularly, I am looking forward to hearing the Plenary talk by Jane Margolis. She is one of the primary reasons I am excited about attending this conference. Dr. Margolis is a researcher at UCLA and her research area is social inequality and education; the gender and race gap in computer science; high school to college equity issues: gender socialization and groupthink. I am most familiar with her work at CMU about women in computer science, their motivations, the culture and experiences. She published a book titled, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing in 2002 about this work. She recently published another book, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing in 2008. In this book, Dr. Margolis studies the culture and experiences of students in three Los Angeles public high schools- an overcrowded urban high school, a math and science magnet school and a school in an affluent neighborhood. She discovers how inequality and segregation are reproduced and creates this race gap in computer science. Dr. Magolis' work shares with the world how the computer sciene race gap is created and maintained through our secondary school systems. I definitely recommend reading this book!

The next several entries are my reflections and notes about the Tapia conference.