Mission (im-)possible? Increasing the participation of female students in university computing courses

In 1990 the Australian Federal government set a target for a 40% enrolment rate of females in all non-traditional areas of study including computer science. In view of this target, the low enrolment of females in computer science at Victoria University is a persisting concern: enrolment rates have continued to decline from 30% in the early 1990s to less than 20% in recent years, despite significant attempts to arrest the decline by introducing annual student recruitment events such as school visits, career nights, and University Open Days. This suggested that the issue of encouraging females to study computing needed to focus more directly on factors deterring females from pursuing computing courses. Misperceptions about the nature of computing studies have long been regarded as such a factor. Accordingly, last year a different initiative was launched. Focusing on girls from the neighbouring high schools, it aimed to dispel the misperceptions, and encourage girls to pursue computing studies, by demonstrating how interesting, easy, and female-friendly computing is at Victoria University. The girls were invited to spend a day in the shoes of a computing student at the University by participating in specially designed classroom activities, interacting with female university students, and lunching at the student cafeteria. While the event proved a winner on the day, it remains to be seen if it will translate into improved female enrolments in the future. However, the effort involved in organising the event and the difficulties encountered in the process revealed the extent and complexity of the struggle for increased participation of females in computing studies. The following questions arose: Who is interested in pursuing the cause? Who is prepared to support it? What would it take to make a change? This paper reflects on these issues

Seminal Barriers to Female High School Students’ Choice of Information Technology as a Career Alternative

The under-representation of women in the IT profession is a well-known Information Systems phenomenon. Unlike the other sciences and mathematics, where the percentage of women receiving bachelor’s degrees has increased over the past two decades, the percentage of women obtaining degrees in technology has decreased. Information Technology started strong in 1984 with 37.06% women receiving bachelor’s degrees; however, 2004 brought a decrease to a low of 25.05%, near the level of three decades earlier. The consequences of this under-representation include non-diverse IT solutions, a predicted IT workforce shortage, and the United States losing its ability to participate as a fervent technological contributor in a global arena. Despite the importance of this issue, previous research has yielded isolated and often conflicting results. Past researchers have concentrated on small subsets rather than examining the complete breadth of barriers to the recruitment and retention of women in the IT field. This research consisted of seven major activities. First, a four-staged IT Career Lifecycle model was developed which advances the work of prior research. Second, it was determined that the specific scope and focus of this research would consist of Stage I of the IT Career Lifecycle model at a point where high school girls are considering college majors. Third, a literature review was conducted to establish a comprehensive list of Stage I barriers that have been identified by previous researchers. Fourth, a second new model was established that identifies and classifies all of the Stage I barriers identified by the literature. As part of this model’s development process, fourteen barriers were analyzed, summarized, and categorized into three sources: the girls, the IT community, and the societal influencers. Fifth, fourteen hypotheses were developed to validate the Stage I Barriers Model. Sixth, a survey was conducted to validate the Stage I model, determine the most prevalent barriers, identify new barriers, and capture the attitudes and perceptions of high school girls regarding the IT profession and its workers. The survey was administered to 417 female junior and senior girls in four high schools in the Chicago metropolitan area. Seventh, the Stage I model was reconstructed to incorporate the knowledge gained from the survey. Thus, through the process of this research, the reconstructed Barrier Model was grounded in research literature and validated through the “real world” view of high school girls’ attitudes, perceptions, and interests in computers and IT careers. Although the goal of the survey was to examine barriers to high school girls’ entry into the Information Technology field of study, findings went beyond that, falling into three main categories: barriers, enablers, and predictors. As expected, some of the findings identified significant barriers that were incorporated into a reconstructed Barrier Model. However, some results uncovered factors that were clearly, not identified as barriers by the participants. Consequently, some originally proposed barriers were reclassified as enablers and others as predictors of IT majors. Still other factors were recognized as having the potential to be classified in more than one way, barriers, enablers, or predictors. Since the original scope of the research incorporated barriers only, a framework did not exist to capture significant findings on enablers or predictors. Therefore, two additional models were developed, the IT Career Enabler and the IT Career Predictor. Additionally, this research created a new Pre-College IT Career framework to contain the three models, embracing factors that may influence high school girls in their potential pursuit of IT careers

Activities To Attract High School Girls To Computer Science

We present several activities used in the two-week PipeLINK summer program for high school girls. These hands-on activities and interactive talks, presented mostly by female faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students, showed the girls the wide range of opportunities in the field of computer science