Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1528-7676

Document Type

Presentation

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Computer Sciences, Information Science, Education, general, including:, *pedagogy, Women's and gender studies

Publication Details

Poster for The United Kingdom and Ireland Computing Education Research (UKICER) 2022 conference from the UK ACM Special Interest Group in Computing Science Education Chapter – Doctoral Consortium. Research: TechMate: A best practice toolkit for driving sustainable acceleration towards gender equality in technology disciplines in HEIs.

Abstract

TechMate is a research project that is being developed to enhance gender balance in technology disciplines, in particular computing higher education in Ireland and beyond. Gender imbalance in computing education is a well-known issue: in Ireland, less than 15% of the student population in computer science, ICT and related disciplines are women. Despite a significant amount of research and practical work conducted in the recent decades, the problem still persists and this research initiative aims to improve the situation.

Among the main aims of this project, there is a development of a toolkit to drive sustainable acceleration towards gender equality in computing fields. The toolkit is to contain practical repeatable actions for different levels of engagement for implementation by universities and other educational institutions. The research question has been formulated as follows:

Can initiatives to improve recruitment and retention in computing higher education be disseminated in a way that encourages implementation and when used, can they have impact?

To answer the research question, objectives were defined, which lead towards the development and evaluation of the toolkit.

TechMate toolkit is based on the actions (which are practical, low level initiatives that have shown impact in enhancing recruitment and retention of women in computing courses) categorisation by Berry et al. (2022).

This project is supervised by Prof. Sarah Jane Delany (TU Dublin), Dr. Susan McKeever (TU Dublin) and Prof. Brenda Murphy (University of Malta).

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/d9a4-bd72

Funder

Higher Education Authority & Huawei Ireland


Share

COinS