Attaching Women to the CS Major

Abstract

The growing gender divide in computer science is one of the more perplexing phenomena on college campuses today, especially considering the rising number of high school girls taking advanced science and math courses. Much of the research on this issue focuses on what deters women from entering the field of computer science. In this paper, we focus instead on what attracts students to the computer science (CS) major. We found that the most consistent themes in student reports were early experiences with computers, the match between a student's self-assessed abilities and the abilities required by computer science, and the features of computing careers. Male and female students who chose a computing major were largely attracted by the same factors, but with some differences. Knowledge of the similarities and differences in what attracts students will allow colleges and universities to develop new, proactive approaches for addressing the gender disparity in their CS programs. Our data were collected from thirty-one focus groups with a total of 182 undergraduate computer science majors. The focus groups were conducted by the principal investigator, J. McGrath Cohoon, or by trained and supervised graduate students. The research team visited sixteen moderateto large-sized computer science departments' across the United States during the spring of 2001. Sites were selected purposely for variation in geographic location, institutional type, highest degree granted, prestige, and gender composition. Geographic location included urban and nonurban institutions. Ten of the institutions were public and six were private. At eleven of the universities, the highest degree granted was a PhD. At three institutions, a master of science was the highest degree granted, and at two institutions, a bachelor's degree was the highest degree granted. Finally, the institutions had varying levels of prestige according to their 1993 NRC rankings. The focus groups were divided in all but one case into exclusively male or exclusively female groups of students. The average number of participants in a focus group was six, but the group sizes ranged from one, in which case a semi-