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Does Gender Matter? Women Talk about Being Female in College Computing Classes

Published: 24 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

A widely held belief among researchers and educators is that gender stereotypes keep women from pursuing IT---that a female identity is inconsistent with a positive computer science identity. As a result, many interventions aim to raise awareness about gender discrimination and bias, and online and school- and community-based groups offer support and mentoring for girls and women. However, not all female students use a gender lens to interpret their experience. In this paper, we use data from 70 women taking an introductory computer science class at either a university or community college to describe the different ways they think about how being female affects their interest or experience in computing classes. We use the findings to explore the conditions under which using a gender lens will undermine or enhance efforts to increase women's participation in computing fields.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Examining the role of computing identity in the computing experiences of women and racially minoritized undergraduates: a literature reviewJournal of Computing in Higher Education10.1007/s12528-023-09375-036:3(773-812)Online publication date: 22-May-2023
  • (2018)An international investigation into student concerns regarding transition into higher education computingProceedings Companion of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3293881.3295780(107-129)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2018

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  1. Does Gender Matter? Women Talk about Being Female in College Computing Classes

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    GenderIT '15: Proceedings of the Third Conference on GenderIT
    April 2015
    68 pages
    ISBN:9781450335966
    DOI:10.1145/2807565
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    • University of Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 24 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. Gender
    2. college
    3. identity

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    • Short-paper
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

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    GenderIT '15
    GenderIT '15: The Third Conference on GenderIT
    April 24, 2015
    PA, Philadelphia, USA

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 39 of 55 submissions, 71%

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    View all
    • (2023)Examining the role of computing identity in the computing experiences of women and racially minoritized undergraduates: a literature reviewJournal of Computing in Higher Education10.1007/s12528-023-09375-036:3(773-812)Online publication date: 22-May-2023
    • (2018)An international investigation into student concerns regarding transition into higher education computingProceedings Companion of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3293881.3295780(107-129)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2018

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