Sense of Belonging of Female Undergraduate Students in Introductory Computer Science Courses at University of Brasília in Brazil

Abstract

Full Paper - The field of Computer Science (CS) has been of little interest to women straight out of high school when considering undergraduate majors in Brazil. At the University of Brasília, a top-ten university in Brazil, female undergraduate students account for less than 15% of the students in the Department of Computer Science. According to Stout and Blaney, a sense of intellectual belonging is “the sense that one is believed to be a competent member of the community”. This perception may be especially challenging for members of underrepresented minority groups, such as female undergraduate students in CS majors. In this context, this paper addresses two research questions: i) “How does the intellectual sense of belonging of female students compare to the male students' in introduction to computer science courses?”; ii) Is it similar for female undergraduate students in both CS and non-CS majors?”. We devised a questionnaire for students in the introduction to computer science courses for different majors. We analyzed the responses and, in general, introductory programming courses are challenging for all students, however, female students feel worse about their computing competencies than male ones.