Paper Info
Title
Exploring Gender Diversity in CS at a Large Public R1 Research University.
Abstract
With the number of Computer Science (CS) jobs on the rise, there is a greater need for Computer Science graduates than ever. At the same time, most CS departments across the country are only seeing 25-30% of female students in their classes, meaning that we are failing to draw interest from a large portion of the population. In this work, we explore the gender gap in CS at Rutgers University using three data sets that span thousands of students across 3.5 academic years. By combining these data sets, we can explore interesting issues such as retention, as students progress through the CS major. For example, we find that a large percentage of women taking the Introductory CS1 course for majors do not intend to major in CS, which contributes to a large increase in the gender gap immediately after CS1. This finding implies that a large part of the retention task is attracting these women to further explore the major. We correlate our findings with initiatives that some CS programs across the country have taken to significantly improve their gender diversity, and identify initiatives that we can start with in our effort to increase the diversity in our program. These findings may also be applicable to the computing programs at other large public research universities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3017680.3017773
SIGCSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Gender diversity, Student retention, Introduction to Computer Science
Gender diversity,Population,Computer science,Knowledge management,Mathematics education,Pedagogy,Gender gap
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.55
14
Authors
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Monica Babes-Vroman171.67
Isabel Juniewicz240.55
Bruno Lucarelli340.55
Nicole Fox440.55
Thu D. Nguyen51518102.53
Andrew Tjang6192.84
Georgiana Haldeman7172.59
Ashni Mehta840.55
Risham Chokshi940.55