Evaluation of Scholarly Sources

In this post, I will continue analyzing the comments made by Satya Nadella at the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. For this blog I will be looking at two scholarly sources.

I will be evaluating:

• What is its purpose?
• How and where is it published?
• What kinds of sources does it cite?
• Who is the author?
• Who is its intended audience?
• How did I find it?

The first scholarly source I will be evaluating is Women in Computer Science by Russell C. Kick, Jr and F. Stuart Wells. The purpose of this scholarly article is to explore women in computer science. It explores women in higher education, women in computer science, and women as working professionals in computer science. It was published in a news paper in 1993 at Tennessee Technological University. It cites very credible sources, for the statistics it uses it cites United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. The article also cites studies which were published by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). The authors are Russell C. Kick, Jr and F. Stuart Wells. Both Russell C. Kick, Jr and F. Stuart Wells are Professors of Decision Sciences at Tennessee Technological University. The intended audience is the Computer Science field. Through their article they are informing the computer science crowd(workers, employees, fans) that women are very capable, if not more capable at excelling in the field of computer science. They also want to inform people that their is a low number of women in the field and that it should become more diverse and that computer science should have more females in the field. I found this article by researching "women in computer science" into Google Scholar. It is relevant to the Satya Nadella controversy because it demonstrates how women in computer science are interpreted, as demonstrated by Nadella.

The second scholarly article I will be analyzing is Much Ado About Salary: Grace Hopper and Satya Nadella by Valerie Barr. The purpose of this article was to analyze the effects that the comments made at the Grace Hopper convention by Nadella had. It explores the significance of them and how by him saying what he said it brought light to the issue of male dominance in the field of IT. It was published in a newsletter in November of 2014. The article sites the actual video of the interview in which Nadella made these comments. It also cites articles explaining why there is an absence of women in the IT field and how women are quitting their jobs in the IT field. This could be information the author uses to connect with the wage gap in this field of work. The author of this article is Valerie Barr. Barr is a computer science professor at Union College. She is a credible author for this site since she, as a women, knows the situation that other females are feeling as she is experienced in the computer science field. The intended audience is the people who heard of the initial event in which Nadella made the comments. If the person was looking for more information and context of the event this is the article they would read. This is why Barr wrote the article. I found this article by researching on Google Scholars for articles related to the controversy. I got lucky because this scholarly source is directly related to the controversy I'm researching.