Computer science professor Gloria Childress Townsend has been named a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society. Townsend, who has taught at DePauw for 40 years, is one of only four educators recognized for outstanding educational contributions to computing. Sixty other computer scientists were recognized for their engineering and scientific contributions.
As a result of these initiatives, women typically make up a larger percentage of computer science majors at DePauw than most institutions of higher learning. According to the National Girls Collaborative Project, only 18 percent of computer science degrees awarded nationwide go to women. But in DePauw’s Class of 2017, 47% of the computer science degrees were awarded to women. In 2020, 37% of computer science graduates were women and, in 2021, 38% of prospective computer science graduates are women.
Townsend supports women in computing outside computer science engineering as well. Among other things, she proposed the association hold annual regional celebrations to support women in computing and she organized the first one in Indiana in 2004. She wrote the application and was principal investigator for a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to increase the number of celebrations to 16, including several outside the United States.
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