Members of the Science, Technology & Society Initiative are currently engaged in two projects related to women and information technology: a Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education and Women in the Information Age. Brief descriptions of each project are below.

Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is leading a Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE) to design and carry out comprehensive programs that address under representation in information technology (IT) education and the workforce. CAITE focuses on women and minorities in groups that are underrepresented in the Massachusetts innovation economy; that is, economically, academically, and socially disadvantaged residents.The project is pilot a series of outreach programs supported by educational pathways in three regions (one rural, one suburban, and one urban). CAITE identifies best practices and disseminates, deploys, extends and institutionalizes these best practices statewide and nationally. Community colleges are the centerpiece of CAITE because of the central role they play in reaching out to underserved populations and in serving as a gateway to careers and further higher education. This project works to build a broad alliance built on its leadership in and partnership with the Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative (CITI), the Boston Area Advanced Technological Education Center (BATEC), regional Louis Stokes Alliances and NSF EGEP programs, and other partnerships and initiatives focused on information technology education and STEM pipeline issues. (NSF 0634412)

Understanding Women's Performance & Persistence in Information Technology

With CAITE, Anna Branch, assistant professor of sociology at UMass Amherst, and Sharla Alegria, research assistant, are investigating the patterns of performance and persistence for women and underrepresented minorities in computer science and information technology courses. This work will explain better the factors affecting performance across gender and ethnicity and will in turn inform CAITE best practices. (Supplement to NSF 0634412)

Women in the Information Age

The Women in the Information Age (WITIA) Project at the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst asks if women are under-represented as users and designers of today's technologies. In time, we intend for WITIA to become a community of researchers, managers and policy-makers with an interest in this gender, information technology, and policy. WITIA was founded with a gift from PriceWaterHouse Coopers in 1999.