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In this article, we describe high school promotional visits and campus workshops developed to encourage
female junior high school students to consider a career in information technology. The students were exposed
to programming concepts and activities in a manner that made such content enjoyable and relatively easy to
understand and were given pre and post workshop questionnaires. Students perceived programming as simpler
and themselves as being more capable after attending these workshops. The article demonstrates the potential for
such workshops to address aspects of perceived diffi culty and of self-perceptions in ability to master such content.
Raina Mason • Graham Cooper • Tim Comber
Girls Get IT
111NOT ENOUGH GIRLS At Southern Cross University (SCU), female information technology (IT) students have av-eraged around 19% of enrolments; yet the per-centage of all students at SCU who are female is 57%. The low numbers of female students
in IT and the potential to increase numbers were the main driv-ers in support of the Women in Information Technology (WIT) program at SCU. The WIT program supports female students studying IT units and promotes IT programs to potential female students via social events, offering scholarships and awards, dis-seminating information on possible careers in IT, and promoting SCU as a women-friendly place to study IT.
As part of the general promotional efforts, IT staff visit local schools to speak to IT students in years 11-12 about education pathways. As very few girls attend these sessions, we decided to target younger students and run girl-only workshops on the SCU campus. This article reports on data collected from two of these workshops.
222NUMBERS According to the Australian Bureau of Statis-tics (ABS) in 2006-7, 45% of the Australian la-bor force was female. It is reasonable to expect that a similar ratio of females to males should be found within the IT industry, but only 27%
of the 106,039 persons employed in Computer System Design and Related Services were female [4]. Similarly, Graduate Careers Aus-tralia (GCA) reported that 21.4% of students graduating in 2006 in IT were female [17].
The proportionally low numbers of women working in the IT sector in Australia [2, 12, 31] and in other countries [5, 13] has long been an issue. In Canada, “Just 29% of female students are considering a career in technology or computers vs. 56% of males” [13, Slide 63]. In the US, the 2008 employment statistics show 27.2% of computer and information system managers were wom-en. Similarly, women fi lled 24.8% of computer and mathematical positions. In contrast, women make up 51.4% of computer opera-tors, 77.3% of data entry operators, and 92.9% of word processors
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72 acm Inroads 2011 September • Vol. 2 • No. 3
males attend SCU (57%), and IT jobs are attractive, so why are women less interested in studying IT?
It appears that females in Western countries are poorly informed about IT as a career. Farrell [13] surveyed 1002 Canadian students consisting of 559 females and 443 males from the fi nal two years of high school and the fi rst two years of tertiary education. Only 29% of female students were interested in an IT career and female students were less likely than males to know about IT careers. In a US survey of 1406 children between the ages of 13 and 17 girls were found to be signifi cantly less interested than boys in computing and demonstrated a negative perception of computing as a career [1].
Another possible reason for women not enrolling in IT could be the infl uence of educators. Barker & Aspray [5, p.20] observed, “Teachers’ beliefs and attitudes about appropriate behaviors and roles for boys and girls, combined with their attitudes and beliefs about technology, can subtly infl uence girls to not study comput-ers.” Consequently, by the time a girl is ready to decide on a career, gender biases have become fi xed and authority fi gures have per-suaded girls that IT is not a suitable career.
Other possible causal factors for fewer girls than boys studying IT are:
� National educational policies;� Relationships with teachers and teacher training;� Use of computers at school and home;� Differences in attitude, confi dence, interest and experience;� Family and community;� Infl uence of peers;� Life aspirations;� Images in popular culture; and� Computer games [5].
Entrenched sexism within the IT industry could also be dis-couraging girls. A presentation [3] at a Ruby conference that used sexual innuendo for humorous effect demonstrates an attitude to-wards women for which many women would not be comfortable. Indeed, “they are a pointed reminder of disturbing behaviour and a reminder that such events can happen again at any time” [15]. At a recent conference sponsored by Microsoft (TechEd 2010), scant-ily clothed female “hosts” were presented to the several thousand strong audience which resulted in an offi cial apology from Micro-soft and much negative publicity.
555WHY DO WOMEN ENROLL IN IT?It is also useful to understand why some wom-en do enroll in IT, as this may indicate pos-sible approaches to take. We previously noted that negative infl uences from educators could
discourage girls so it is not surprising that positive infl uences can encourage girls. A survey of 275 members of an online site devoted to women interested in the technical side of computing found that school experiences were important and that women were strongly infl uenced by friends and colleagues [27]. The authors also ob-served that a degree in computer science was not a necessary pre-
and typists [28]. However, Ng et al [25] reported that in Malaysia 50 percent of enrolments in IT and computer sciences were female, suggesting that low enrolments in IT may be a cultural issue rather than the result of some intrinsic difference. However, in many de-veloping countries, a high enrolment of female students occurs in technical subjects that is not refl ected in IT careers [19].
It is interesting to note that a reversal of this gender inequality exists in nursing (91.7% female) and teaching (preschool, 97.6% female and middle school 81.2% female) [28].
Charles & Bradley [9] examined UNESCO and OOECD data and found that in the twenty-one countries from which data was available, there was a fairly consistent pattern of more women graduating in non-technical fi elds and less women graduating in computer science.
333WHY SHOULD WOMEN BE EMPLOYED IN IT?A number of researchers have pointed out rea-sons why the promotion of IT careers should occur for women. For example, Kelleher et al [23] stressed the importance of all members of
society contributing to new technologies. Hu [21] observed that lower numbers of students leads to a lack of gender diversity in jobs and offers the example of producing video games where employ-ing more females might lead to games that are more attractive to girls. Furthermore, increasing the number of women employed in IT is desirable because the IT industry needs more workers, IT is a desirable area to work in, diversity in the workforce is important, and IT is a tool for solving the big problems [5].
444WHY ARE WOMEN NOT ENROLLING IN IT?It is likely that an increased proportion of women could be employed in IT in Australia than is currently the case (45% of the work-ing population are female). More females than
It is likely that an increased proportion of women could be employed in IT in Australia than is currently the case (45% of the working population are female).
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requisite for an IT career for many women as an “interest and tal-ent in IT emerged gradually and developed over time” (p.16). In a survey of sixteen women, Kahle and Schmidt [22] found that an interest in the fi eld or the intellectual challenge motivated half the respondents and salary motivated a quarter of the respondents.
Another motivator for girls is to show how IT is not just pro-gramming but involves interaction with many different fi elds of study. Fisher & Margolis [14] found that women were more inter-ested in the context of computing than computing as a pure disci-pline, which suggests that when promoting IT to girls the useful-ness of IT needs to be stressed.
Bayer & DeKeuster [7] surveyed 180 computer science students (62 female, 118 male) and 98 MIS students at a small public US university in 2001 and 2002. They concluded that positive role models are important in encouraging women to enroll in comput-ing studies. They also noted that women need to be aware that women are as capable of using computers as are men and that com-puter science is not just working with computers.
666WHEN IS THE BEST TIME TO INTERVENE?There are two groups of females we could tar-get to improve IT numbers. Turner et al [27] suggests that we should target adult women because of the development of interest in IT
over time; other studies suggest school age children. Graham & Latulipe [18] suggest that female students need an introduction to computer science before students absorb cultural stereotypes, i.e. grades 9 and 10 (14-16 years of age). Barker et al [6] found that younger girls enjoyed workshops more than older girls possibly be-cause of less exposure to such events and because they had not yet decided on possible career choices.
777WHAT HAS BEEN DONE?Carmichael [8] delivered a course using Game Maker software for the practical com-ponent and lectures. Twelve ‘gifted’ girls in a Canadian middle school attended the week-long course. At the conclusion of the course,
they found that:� Most preferred a girl only course;� The most popular topic was computer graphics then artifi cial
intelligence;� The girls were happy with Game Maker; and� More than half the girls indicated that they were more likely
to try computer science.
Craig & Horton [10] ran workshops during a school day with Grade 8 girls that involved designing interfaces and simple pro-gramming, while Barker et al [6] have suggested that recruitment workshops should have the following characteristics:
� Not be just interesting and fun but also show how IT can improve society;
� Describe what prior learning is required to successfully undertake IT courses; and
� Provide heuristics to deal with male dominated classes.
888METHODOLOGYDuring promotional visits to local schools, it was noticed that there were few or no girls at-tending sessions on IT careers for school leav-ers. They suggested targeting younger girls [18], before the students chose subjects for
their two fi nal years of school. A Higher Education Equity Sup-port Project (HEESP) grant (designed to support projects that promoted equity) allowed us to develop a program to present to younger girls the proposition that IT is a career worth considering. Four local schools met the HEESP grant requirements (low socio-economic profi le or rural) and information sessions were scheduled at each school.
The fi rst school (638 students, grades 7-12, 45% girls) visit was not a success due to the unsuitable location (a basketball court with a basketball game in progress on a neighboring court) and condi-tions (all of Grade 10 - 150 students - at once, for a ten- minute session) and no girls were recruited. The manner in which this was organized may be indicative of the “low priority” given to the mar-keting of IT to girls. We decided to arrange personally the remain-ing sessions at the other schools.
At the second school (a smaller rural school with 262 students, grades K-12, 43% girls) the career visit was successful and 10 girls were recruited for the fi rst on-campus workshop reported on in this paper.
The third school (804 students, grades 7-12, 55% girls) was very enthusiastic during the initial careers class visits, but failed to at-tend the campus workshops on two separate occasions. This high-lights one diffi culty with arranging school visits: it is not possible to arrange with the students directly; instead, arrangements must be made through relevant teachers. In this case, coordinating the campus based workshops with transportation for the students to the campus, presented as ineffective.
The fourth school’s (974 students, grades 7-12, 48% girls) ca-reers visits was also very successful and this school accepted our invitation to an “IT Girls Day” and is the second on-campus work-shop referred to in this paper.
Another motivator for girls is to show how IT is not just programming but involves interaction with many different fi elds of study.
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74 acm Inroads 2011 September • Vol. 2 • No. 3
activities. At the conclusion of these sessions, a post-workshop questionnaire was administered and the girls then had lunch with IT staff and some female university students. After lunch, the stu-dents were given a "sample bag” containing the install fi les and tutorials for Alice on a fl ash drive, promotional material for SCU and some candies and fi nally the girls were given a brief tour of the campus.
The pre- and post- questionnaires were highly similar in ques-tions, format and sequence. These were constructed with the intent of determining if there was any change in the girls’ attitude towards programming after a half day exposure to programming in Alice and programming Mindstorms robots. Both questionnaires pre-sented a series of questions utilizing 9-point Likert scales except for the name, age and open-ended questions.
The fi rst questionnaire asked about the girl’s fi rst name, age, computer and programming knowledge (1= not knowledgeable at all; 9 = expert), perceived diffi culty of, and confi dence with pro-gramming, whether girls were better than boys at programming, and level of interest towards, and anticipated diffi culty of, pro-gramming Alice and programming robots.
The second questionnaire repeated the name and age questions so we could match the responses with the fi rst questionnaire. It also repeated the questions regarding attitudes towards programming
In each school visit, we took an all-female group of two or three persons into the school to speak to all of the students (male and female) in a grade about the range of careers in IT and educa-tion pathways to these careers. We also took along Mindstorms NXT robots with the intent of sparking interest in the students. A schools ambassador (a current female student studying IT at SCU) answered any questions the students had about studying at uni-versity. These visits involved typically speaking to two classes each time (around 50 students) for a school period (ranging from 40 to 60 minutes). The interested female students were then invited to an on-campus "IT Girls Day”, around three weeks after the visit. We decided to limit this initial day of workshops to a maximum of 12 participants. Ten girls accepted the offer for our initial IT Girls Day (from the fi rst school) in October 2009. At the fourth school, 9 students accepted our offer, and this IT Girls day was held in February 2010.
Both IT Girls Days began with a short welcome and a pre-workshop questionnaire. We then divided the girls divided into two equal groups with the fi rst group doing a session on programming Alice (v2.2 http://www.alice.org/) while the second group had an introduction to Mindstorms NXT robots (see http://mindstorms.lego.com/). This programming session was followed by morning tea and an informal chat session and then the two groups swapped
Figure 1: Two students participating in the Mindstorms NXT robots programming session.
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ered the Mindstorms programming was highly enjoyable.Some of the answers to the open-ended questionnaires were
revealing, showing a high identifi cation with the IT Girls Day program, the university, IT, and the staff running the course. Com-ments included:
� “Thank you for the experience. We are the IT Girls Love you guys”
� “Alice!!! Loving her xxx”, � “Cya next year! ^_^” � “It was an opportunity to learn about things we probably
would otherwise have no experience with. It was good to try something new and different and be able to ask questions and get help.”
� “I really loved the Alice program”, � “I thought it would be a lot more diffi cult. But they make it
so much more simple” and � “Now that I have done a little bit of programming, it’s easier
than I thought.”
10101010DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONSWe designed the Alice environment to make computer programming more attractive to novices by means of a 3D environment using drag and drop snippets of code. Research on
the use of Alice to attract girls to computing has shown that girls prefer the 3D storytelling approach [24]. The logo for Alice is the Disney version of the “Alice in Wonderland” character, after which it is named. In contrast, the Mindstorms NXT robots appear me-chanical and more stereotypically male-oriented. It is not therefore surprising that before the workshops the girls anticipated that Al-ice would be easier to use than the Mindstorms NXT robots. How-ever, after experiencing both environments they found them to be the same diffi culty [moderately low] so that after the workshops they were comparatively more positive to Mindstorms.
The girls’ perception of the diffi culty of programming altered
and gender impact on programming ability. We added two ques-tions regarding their enjoyment of Alice and Mindstorms, repeated the questions about their attitude towards Alice and robots, and added a question about diffi culty of use. We asked about the men-tal effort required for Alice and Mindstorms and concluded with three open-ended questions about the workshops.
999RESULTSOn both days the girls ranged in age from 14 to 16 with the majority at 15. All felt that they had an average level of computer knowledge and all but two students reported that they had no programming experience. Both of these
students reported that they had a very low level of programming experience. In the fi rst workshop, most of the girls believed that boys were better at programming than girls were. This attitude re-mained unchanged after the workshop. For the second IT Girls day, we changed the wording of this question from “Generally, girls are better than boys at programming” to ”Generally, boys are better than girls at programming”, and asked how much the participants agreed/disagreed with the statement. We again found no difference before and after the workshop, however girls in the second work-shop believed that girls were better than boys were at program-ming. These results need further investigation.
The attitudes of both groups of girls towards programming in general improved after completing the workshop (a signifi cance level of p = 0.05 is used throughout this paper). The perceived dif-fi culty of programming generally was signifi cantly less after the workshop [single factor ANOVA, Workshop 1: F(1,18) = 4.41, p=0.004; Workshop 2: F(1,16) = 4.49, p=0.011]. The confi dence in programming was signifi cantly improved [single factor ANOVA, Workshop 1: F(1,18) = 4.41, p<0.001; Workshop 2: F(1,16) = 4.49, p<0.001].
Before workshop 1, the students indicated the expectation that programming with Alice would be moderately easy, and that they were interested in programming with it. After the workshop, there was no signifi cant difference in attitude towards perceived diffi cul-ty and interest. The students had high enjoyment of the workshop. In contrast, for Mindstorms there was a signifi cant difference in the perceived diffi culty before (high) and after (moderately-low) the workshops [single factor ANOVA, F(1,18) = 4.41, p=0.001] al-though there was no signifi cant difference in interest between start and end, which stayed high. As with Alice, the girls considered that Mindstorms was highly enjoyable to use.
For workshop 2, there was no signifi cant difference in perceived interest in programming with Alice. There was a statistically sig-nifi cant downwards change in perceived diffi culty after the work-shop when compared with attitude before the workshop [Single factor ANOVA, F(1,16)=4.49, p=0.001]. The students indicated high enjoyment of the workshop. As with the fi rst group, there was a signifi cant difference in the perceived diffi culty before (high) and after (moderately-low) the workshops [single factor ANOVA, F(1,16)=4.49, p<0.001] and no signifi cant difference in interest from start to end, which stayed high. Again, the students consid-
On both days the girls ranged in age from 14 to 16 with the majority at 15. All felt that they had an average level of computer knowledge and all but two students reported that they had no programming experience.
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analyses returned signifi cant levels (at the 0.05 level). Indeed, of the 19 participants 17 shifted their measure on the Likert scale regarding the perceived level of diffi culty with respect to program-ming towards the direction of “easy”. This alone speaks for the suc-cess of the workshops in presenting an intervention that modifi es girls’ perceptions of programming in a positive manner.
The nature of the workshop interventions and the specifi c factors and dynamics involved in causing such a shift cannot be specifi cally determined. While the surface cues of the workshops specifi cally use female presenters, and specifi cally had only girl students present, there are deeper structural aspects of the work-shops that lie beyond the scope of the present paper. We selected, designed and engineered the programming software, the instruc-tional materials, and the class activities with the intent of making such introductory programming “easy” at both a conceptual level and a practical (implementation) level. The specifi cs of how such designs may have facilitated the learning and perceived easiness of programming is of broad interest and potentially much broader application.
The present study was motivated by the intent of providing more positive self-effi cacy in female students with respect to their capabilities in programming. In this regard, it has clearly been suc-cessful. The extent to which introductory programming can be de-signed to be more accessible to all students, regardless of gender, and perhaps too regardless of a student’s self-confi dence in their abilities regarding areas of applied (traditionally “diffi cult”) pro-gramming, remains to be tested. Ir
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because of the workshops. This was supported by the statistical analyses and it was apparent in informal discussions with the girls afterwards. Other authors, e.g. [10] have suggested that hands-on workshops would improve the attitude of girls towards IT and our work supports this observation.
We envisage that this is the fi rst of a series of reports on experi-ences running workshops for schoolgirls. The intent is to modify some questions in the pre- and post-workshop questionnaires to explore aspects of the students’ self-effi cacy. For example, Ques-
tion 5 in the fi rst workshop ‘Generally, girls are better than boys at programming’ was reworded in the second workshop to ‘Gener-ally, boys are better than girls at programming’ to test the validity of the question. We would like to continue rewording this ques-tion to tease out differences in responses we observed between the two groups. We also intend to ask about factors that may infl uence the girls’ perception of the programming environments as ‘easy’ or ‘more diffi cult’.
The nature of the workshops requires small classes so that the girls receive close attention. It is felt that using males to run the classes would be counter-productive but we have only one full-time female academic staff member and only with diffi culty were we able to fi nd female students capable of running the workshops. Furthermore, we feel that it is important to only run workshops for girls from the one school so that they feel more comfortable with other students within the workshop environment.
Despite the low numbers of workshop trials (2) and the low number of participants (19), it should be noted that the statistical
The nature of the workshops requires small classes so that the girls receive close attention. It is felt that using males to run the classes would be counter-productive but we have only one full-time female academic staff member and only with diffi culty were we able to fi nd female students capable of running the workshops.
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RAINA MASONSouthern Cross Business SchoolSouthern Cross UniversityCoffs Harbour NSW 2457 Australia
GRAHAM COOPERSouthern Cross Business SchoolSouthern Cross UniversityCoffs Harbour NSW 2457 Australia
TIM COMBERSouthern Cross Business SchoolSouthern Cross UniversityCoffs Harbour NSW 2457 Australia
Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education, Computer science education.General terms: Human FactorsKeywords: IT careers, feminism, feminist theory, gender equity, gender issues, gender research, Alice, Mindstorms NXT, attitude, high school
DOI: 10.1145/2003616.2003638 © 2011 ACM 2153-2184/11/09 $10.00
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