Sonja Stump
Peter Osgood ’76, director of admissions at Harvey Mudd College, a leader among science, math, and technology schools in enrolling women. With wife, Nancy, running for election to the school board in Claremont, Calif., and their children, Connor, left, a high-school senior, and Aidyn (given name is Perry, but he is transgender and unoff icially changed his name), a junior at Williams College who is studying abroad at Oxford this school year.
PETER OSGOOD ’76/
Claremont Port Side, “the progressive publication of the Claremont Colleges,” ran this cartoon lampooning student reaction to a surge in enrollment by women students at Harvey Mudd.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS
W
hen Peter Osgood ’76 was suddenly promoted to the top admissions job at Harvey Mudd College in 2006, he faced a daunting challenge. Only 25 percent of new students at the hardcore math, science, and engineering liberal-arts school were female – an unexpected dip from the previous few years when gender balance had improved. The new college president, a woman, wanted answers and change. Fast. By the next year, females were at 42 percent. By 2010, 52 percent. This fall, 47 percent. Some hailed Osgood as a hero. Others hurled charges he’d “lowered standards.” Not true; women as a group are near the top of the applicant pool each year. What he’d pulled off was leading a serious ramp-up of outreach to “make women feel very welcome,” including subsidizing women applicants’ visits to campus; aiming merit scholarships at underrepresented groups, which at Mudd includes women; highlighting female faculty, mentors; and changing teaching approaches. For example, introductory computer-science classes now emphasize how computers are a cool tool to solve problems. Before, Osgood said, they started with theory and hardcore coding, which rewarded the
Courtesy of the Claremont Port Side
“(male) geeks who come in knowing how to program everything” and tended to make women, who generally haven’t had the same prior experience in the field, feel outmatched from the start. In the span of a few years, the percentage of Mudd women in computer science went from 15 to 40 percent. When his oldest child, Perry, announced this summer that he was transgender and would now be known as Aidyn, Osgood embarked on a personal journey that ultimately dovetailed with his efforts at Mudd. ➢ Gender Matters
39