PAST Projects & Research

This synthesis project conducted an in-depth investigation of literature from the past 20 years (2000-2019), identifying promising practices for increasing engagement and retention of minority women in technology and computing higher education and career pathways. The project also broadly disseminated findings and recommendations to decision-makers and leaders in the professional and academic fields of technology and computing. The project’s main question was: What factors affect the experiences, participation, and advancement of women of color in technology and computing from the stages of early college education through their careers? The goals of the project were to:

1. build new knowledge and understanding of the factors affecting the retention of women of color in technology and computing;
2. identify gaps in research;
3. inform leaders in the field about promising policies and practices that retain women of color in technology and computing; and
4. make methodological contributions through the testing and refinement of meta-synthesis tools and processes.

LASOW was a systematic synthesis project that analyzed and integrated the findings from empirical research on the factors that affect the retention of women of color in technology and computing higher education and careers. Its main research activities included:

• refining and testing systematic synthesis methods;
• systematically searching the empirical literature on women of color in computing and technology;
• appraising the quality of the literature for their inclusion in the synthesis;
• developing a synthesis of the literature; and
• developing recommendations for the field about promising policies and practices.

This project informed areas for future research and helped to identify promising practices that others can implement. The project resulted in a report to help inform those who are practitioners in STEM education, STEM employers, and STEM policy makers.

• Jaumot-Pascual, N., Ong, M., Silva, C., & Martínez-Gudapakkam, A. (2021). Women of Color Leveraging Community Cultural Wealth to Persist in Computing and Tech Graduate Education: A Qualitative Meta-Synthesis. Education Sciences, 11(12), 797. MDPI AG. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/educsci11120797
• Jaumot-Pascual, N., Silva, C. B., Martinez-Gudapakkam, A., & Ong, M. (2021). Women of Color in Computing Graduate Education: Structural Supports and Navigation Strategies for a Hostile Culture, in 2021 Research in Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), pp. 1-9. https://www.terc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/WOCinCSGraduateEd_RESPECT_NOTBlinded_FINAL.pdf