Harvey Mudd College and the Anita Borg Institute, along with technology companies including Facebook Inc. and Intel Corp., have begun an initiative to increase the diversity of computer science undergraduates, amid a debate about the issue in Silicon Valley.
Under the effort, named Building Recruiting and Inclusion for Diversity, or BRAID, the companies -- which also include Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. -- will donate a combined total of $1.35 million over the next three years to the computer science departments of 15 universities. The schools have agreed to follow practices used by institutions such as Harvey Mudd, where almost half of the computer science majors at the Los Angeles-area liberal arts school last year were female.
