55 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 299 2019 been an improvement in the representation of women and people of color, which has been historically low. The percentage of information science degrees earned by women has remained steady at about 22%, and between 2011 and 2015 there was an increase from 13.6% to 15.9% of computer science degrees earned by women this is still a small fraction of overall degrees awarded. The share of computer science, computer engineering, and information science degrees awarded to African Americans decreased between 2009 and 2015 from 8.0% to 6.1% for computer science, 5.8% to 4.9% for computer engineering, and 15.0% to 13.4% for information science.25 Looking at enrollments in AI courses at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley in 2017, both schools reported enrollments in introductory AI courses as approximately 74% male, and introductory machine learning as about 76% male at Stanford and 79% male at Berkeley.26 Sexist jokes, slide presentations that only show men, and masculine language are some of the reasons that women lack interest in computer science.27 Understanding that undergraduates in these majors populate the pipeline for graduate students and future PhDs as well as for the workforce looking to hire AI talent, universities must be mindful of the biases that can be formed with this type of white-male-dominated educational environment. Research librarians at many universities have been actively engaged in the curriculum, partnering with faculty in all disciplines. Engaging librarians in computer and data science courses can help with teaching students about important concepts such as validating information, understanding data provenance, finding appropriate information resources and vetted data to use in their research and experiments, and issues related to privacy and ethical uses of data. Teaching students about good research practices very early—for example, documenting algorithms, questioning data sources, and archiving software and data so that the expected behavior of algorithms can be replicated by others—is also useful information that librarians can teach as part of the curriculum. Librarians are familiar with policies, such as Title IX,28 related to sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior and
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