Author ORCID Identifier
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
Abstract
While in recent decades a number of efforts have been coordinated to address the issue of gender imbalance in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines, the problem still persists. Many authors speak of the ‘leaky’ pipeline metaphor that describes the loss of women in STEM areas before reaching senior roles. Research shows that women who leave are unlikely to return. The issue is particularly severe in the area of computer science, where women represent less than 20% of the labour force across the EU.
This poster introduces a summary of findings from the literature on how to effectively recruit and retain women in computer science education.
The focus was to identify initiatives with demonstrated impact that targeted mainly female undergraduate computing, computer science and technology students. This work considers the initiatives and interventions reported by the academic community, but also includes success stories from the non-academic sources around the globe, such as international equality awards submissions and online reports from universities, non-profit organisations and personal practices. Sources in languages other than English have also been considered.
Practical initiatives that showed impact (which we call ‘Actions’) were identified and categorised into four groups comprising Policy, Pedagogy, Promotion and Influence. Each category is arranged into sub-groups and examples of actions that showed impact are provided for each of these groups.
This research aims to help the wider community to get one step closer towards gender balance in computer science.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/p8rs-2f05
Recommended Citation
Berry, A., McKeever, S., Murphy, B., & Delany, S. J. (2021). The 12th Annual Graduate Research Symposium 2021 Poster TU Dublin: How to Recruit and Retain Women in Computer Science. Technological University Dublin. DOI: 10.21427/P8RS-2F05
Funder
Higher Education Authority & Huawei Ireland
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Included in
Computer Sciences Commons, Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons, Educational Methods Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Publication Details
Poster distributed at the 12th Annual Graduate Research Symposium 2021 – Technological University Dublin. Research: An investigation of working actions to improve gender balance in computer science education. The poster presents with the categorisation of actions grouped into four main areas and examples for implementation.