[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/ skip to main content
10.1145/1352135.1352275acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessigcseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Cultural representations of gender among u. s. computer science undergraduates: statistical and data mining results

Published: 12 March 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Worldwide, there is substantial evidence that cultural contexts may either support or hinder the number of women versus men participating in computing. There is also evidence that certain computing disciplines have more appeal to women than others. Hence research on any computing gender gap should be specific to a culture and a computing discipline. In the United States (US) a popular belief is that Computer Science (CS) has a decidedly 'masculine culture'. This paper reports on research that investigates this perception, comparing CS undergraduates to undergraduates in non-computing disciplines (NCD). The data were collected in a nationwide purposeful sampling of US citizens attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) with an ethnic compositional focus on African Americans and Caucasians. The paper describes a survey scale developed in the US to characterize a person's gender role as feminine, masculine, or androgynous. The data were analyzed using statistical and data mining techniques. Surprisingly, CS students were found to be more androgynous than masculine.

References

[1]
Adams, J., Bauer, V., and Baichoo, S. An expanding pipeline: Gender in Mauritius. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCSE'03 (Feb. 19-23, 2003), Reno, NV, 59--63.
[2]
Barker, L., and Aspray, W. The state of research on girls and IT. In Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation, J. McGrath Cohoon and W. Aspray (Eds.), 1--5--5--54, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006.
[3]
Bem, S. The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42, 2 (1974), 155--162.
[4]
Galpin, V. Women in computing around the world. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin -- inroads, 34, 2 (2002), 94--100.
[5]
Gharibyan, H. and Gunsaulus, S. Gender gap in computer science does not exist in one former Soviet republic: Results of a study. In Proceedings of the ACM ITiCSE'06 (June 26-28, 2006), Bologna, Italy, 222--226.
[6]
Harris, A. Ethnicity as a determinant of sex role identity: A replication study of item selection for the BSRI. Sex Roles, 31, (1994), 241--273.
[7]
Harris, I., Torres, J. and Allender, D. The responses of African American men to dominant norms of masculinity within the US. Sex Roles, 31, (1994), 705--718.
[8]
Lopez, A. and Schulte, L. African American women in the computing sciences: A group to be studied. In Proceedings of ACM SIGCSE'02 (Feb. 27 - Mar. 3, 2002), Covington, KY, 87--90.
[9]
McGrath Cohoon, J. and Aspray, W. A critical review of the research in women's participation in postsecondary computing education. In Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation, J. McGrath Cohoon and W. Aspray (Eds.), 137--180, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006.
[10]
Othman, M. and Latih, R. Women in computer science: No shortage here! Comm. of ACM, 49, 3 (2006), 111--114.
[11]
Pande, R. Digital divide, gender, and the Indian experience in IT. In Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology, E. Trauth (Ed.), 191--199, Idea Group Reference, Hershey, PA, 2006.
[12]
Quinlan, J. C4.5: Programs for machine learning. Morgan Kaufmann, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1993.
[13]
Randall, C., Price, B. and Reichgelt, H. Women in computing programs: Does the incredible shrinking pipeline apply to all computing programs? ACM SIGCSE Bulletin - inroads, 35, 4 (2003), 55-5-59.
[14]
Seel, R. Culture and complexity: New insights on organizational change. Organizations and People, 7, 2 (2002), 2--9.
[15]
Shackelford, R., Cross, J., Davis, G., Impagliazzo, J., Kamali, R., LeBlance, R., Lunt, B., McGettrick, A., Sloan, R. and Topi, H. Computing Curricula 2005: The overview report, on the Internet at http://www.acm.org/education/curric_vols/CC2005-March06Final.pdf.

Index Terms

  1. Cultural representations of gender among u. s. computer science undergraduates: statistical and data mining results

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCSE '08: Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
      March 2008
      606 pages
      ISBN:9781595937995
      DOI:10.1145/1352135
      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 ACM 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]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 12 March 2008

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. computer science
      2. culture
      3. data mining
      4. ethnicity
      5. gender roles

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      SIGCSE '08

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

      Upcoming Conference

      SIGCSE TS 2025
      The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
      February 26 - March 1, 2025
      Pittsburgh , PA , USA

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • 0
        Total Citations
      • 467
        Total Downloads
      • Downloads (Last 12 months)3
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
      Reflects downloads up to 09 Jan 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media