research-article

An Unexplored Relationship: Women in Computing and Athletics

Authors:

Khadija Jirari Stewart,

Gloria Childress Townsend,

Sharmin TunguzAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Pages 699 - 705

https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366884

Published: 26 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The literature documents the underrepresentation of women in computer science, reasons for the absence of women in computing, and promising practices for increasing female majors in computer science. Among the many reasons for women's avoidance of computer science are: feelings of intimidation, lack of confidence, and aversion to the competitive climate in computing. This paper reports results from a study whose purpose lies in surveying a sample of 457 students at a Midwest US university to answer the questions: What are the personality traits of female athletes who enroll in computer science courses? How are these traits similar to or different from those of male athletes, non-athletes, and students who do not enroll in Computer Science I (CS1) How do grades in CS1 differ among these groups? How do personality traits, gender, athletic team membership, and grades interact? The results of this research study indicate that when females' levels of confidence and intimidation are similar to those of their male peers, women outperform males in CS1. This novel study and its results open the door to additional research questions, new strategies for recruiting women into computing, and potential projects involving female athletes and computer science.

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Digital Library

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Cited By

Townsend GStewart KTunguz SGiannakos MSindre GLuxton-Reilly ADivitini M(2020)The Power of Female Athletes to Level the Computer Science Playing FieldProceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3341525.3387416(232-238)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341525.3387416

Index Terms

An Unexplored Relationship: Women in Computing and Athletics
1. Social and professional topics
  1. User characteristics
    1. Gender
      1. Women

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

February 2020

1502 pages

ISBN:9781450367936

DOI:10.1145/3328778

General Chairs:
Jian Zhang
Texas Woman's University, USA
,
Mark Sherriff
University of Virginia, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Sarah Heckman
North Carolina State University, USA
,
Pamela Cutter
Kalamazoo College, USA
,
Alvaro Monge
California State University, Long Beach, USA

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 26 February 2020

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Cited By

Townsend GStewart KTunguz SGiannakos MSindre GLuxton-Reilly ADivitini M(2020)The Power of Female Athletes to Level the Computer Science Playing FieldProceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3341525.3387416(232-238)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341525.3387416

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