”Should I Add ’Computer Science Education’ to My TinderTM-Bio?”: An Investigation of Teacher Candidates’ Stereotyping

Abstract

It is a well known fact, that computer science (CS) is one of the most stereotyped and cliched (STEM-)disciplines. Computer scientists are generally perceived as being male, physically unappealing, boring, uptight loners working with machines instead of people all day long. Obviously, these often unjustified stereotypes are not compatible with many high school graduates’ – especially girls’ and (young) women’s – self-concepts. Presumably, this incongruity is co-responsible for the low number of CS students in western cultures. In order to counteract these biases and cliches to broaden participation in CS study programs, these stereotypes need to be documented first. While this is already the case for CS and computer scientists in general, analogous investigations that focus on CS education (CSE) and CS teacher students in particular are still missing in scientific literature. Since western countries share a huge demand on qualified CS teachers, equivalent investigations can generate useful derivations for CSE study program planners as well. Therefore, this paper presents an online based repertory grid survey on the stereotyping of teacher students of various study subjects like CS, Physical Education, History, or Politics among others. Results show, that of all teacher candidates, CSE students were by far most likely to be rated unappealing and male. Attributed characteristics mostly were negatively connotated. At one of the survey’s questions focussing on who the participant would most likely ”like” (swipe right) and ”dislike” (swipe left) on the popular casual-dating-app TinderTM, the prototypical CSE student was ”disliked” by almost every second participant.