Computing Educational Activities Involving People Rather Than Things Appeal More to Women (Recruitment Perspective)
In this episode I unpack Christensen et al.’s (2021) publication titled “Computing educational activities involving people rather than things appeal more to women (recruitment perspective),” which investigated the preferences of high school males and females for computing educational activities with people or things.
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Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
each week of this podcast is either an
interview with a guest or multiple
guests talking about computer science
education or a solo episode where i
unpack some scholarship in this week's
particular episode i'm unpacking a paper
titled computing educational activities
involving people rather than things
appeal to more women recruitment
perspective and this paper was written
by ingrid maria christensen melissa ho
marcher pal grabarz czech terese terese
graverson and klaus brabrand apologies
if i mispronounce any names all right so
here's the abstract for this particular
paper quote there is a strong need for a
more equal gender balance within the
computing field in 1998 richard a lipa
uncovered a relationship between gender
and preference within the people things
spectrum with women preferring
people-oriented activities to a higher
degree than men the aim of this paper is
twofold first of all we wish to
determine if a similar relation can be
established in the particular context of
competing educational activities second
of all we wish to see if lipa's findings
can be extrapolated to contemporary high
school students to do that we designed
and conducted an experiment involving
around 500 danish high school students
who have been asked to choose between a
people-themed version versus an
isomorphic things themed version of four
activities representative for computing
education the results show that the odds
of a woman preferring a task involving
people is 2.7 times higher than those of
the man the odds of a student without
prior programming experience preferring
a task involving people is 1.4 times
higher than those of students with
programming experience if we compare
women without programming experiences to
men with programming experience the
effect is even more pronounced indeed
the combined effect is 3.8 2.7 times 1.4
our study implies a recommendation for
computing educators to whenever possible
favor educational activities involving
people over things this makes
educational activities appeal more to
female students and to students without
programming experience while not making
a difference for male students or
students with programming experience
since the experiment measured only the
appeal of tasks the users were not
expected to perform them the results we
obtained can be useful for recruitment
processes where the overall image and
appeal of material make a difference end
quote all right so that's abstract is
actually a very excellent summary of not
only the study itself but the findings
from it and some of the recommendations
but if i were to summarize this into a
single sentence i'd say that this study
investigated the preferences of high
school males and females for computing
educational activities with people or
things now this particular paper was
presented at the 2021 icer conference
you can find a direct link to that in
the show notes as well as a link to some
of the google scholar profiles of the
authors so you can read some more papers
by them and the show notes by the way
can be found at jared o'leary.com where
there's hundreds if not thousands of
free resources for computer science
educators including a link to boot up
pd.org which is the nonprofit that i
create curriculum for by the way that
curriculum is 100 free as well all right
so the paper begins with an introduction
that's talking about information and
computing technology in particular in
the eu they said that about 17.9 percent
of people
were women in 2019 and in the united
states is about 25 so they mentioned
that in the ict and computing fields
there is a need for better recruitment
opportunities for women so what they
ended up doing for this particular study
is they looked at richard lipa's prior
work on women preferring
people versus things so in other words
like if you're going to work on a
project or a problem maybe a story about
a person and they're trying to solve a
particular problem as opposed to
just solving a problem about like robots
or cars or something so on page 128 they
kind of summarize some of lipo's
findings and some different studies and
then they mention also on the same page
that this particular paper is guided by
three particular research questions and
they are quote to what extent does the
gender of high school students impact
preferences for people versus things in
computing educational activities to what
extent does prior programming experience
impact preferences to what extent do
preferences vary between tasks end quote
so what the authors ended up doing is
they created like four different
hypothetical tasks so they were supposed
to represent a project an article a
presentation and some kind of an
exercise they gave these tasks to the
different high school students and each
task basically had two different
versions one was a people themed version
and then another version was a things
themed version now what they did is they
basically match the two so that if there
was an image of a person on the
people-themed version then there would
be like an image of a robot or like a
picture of nuts and bolts or something
if it had to do with the particular
project they also match the pronouns and
the
verbage within the two examples as well
so if there's a person mentioned in the
left hand side then maybe on the right
hand side they would have an object
mentioned instead otherwise the rest of
the sentence structure and syntax and
whatnot was the same so in this
particular study it was high school
students from danish high schools in the
copenhagen area now in this paper they
do have a good explanation of the design
and the analysis and whatnot and i'm
going to skip that so going into the
results on page 132 they do mention that
they had 488 respondents and of that
roughly 63 percent were women and 37
were men which actually aligns with the
national gender distribution of high
schools in 2019 where 61 are women and
not being familiar with the reasons for
that i'm curious why is it that denmark
has such a high percentage of women in
high school and not men now the authors
do note that no participants entered
non-binary as their gender so this was
only people who identified as male and
female in this particular study all
right so here's a quote of the results
from page 132 quote we see that more
than half of the women 52 strongly
prefer the people version whereas this
was only the case for about a fourth of
the men 27 on the things into the
spectrum we see that almost none of the
women only four percent strongly prefer
the things version whereas this was the
case for about a six of the men 16
in general we see a tendency for the
women to gravitate towards the people
into the spectrum left side compared to
the men whose response appear to fall
more uniformly on the preference scale
end quote so this particular finding is
interesting so this actually goes
against one of the recommendations from
a study that i previously discussed and
i'll talk about this more in the
lingering questions and thoughts so
under the programming experience for
this particular study there's an
interesting note on page 134 that said
that quote almost three-quarters of the
women report no prior programming
experience whereas this was only the
case for about half of the men in quote
in particular on page 135 they mentioned
that people who don't have programming
experience which in this case most of
the women do not have programming
experience they prefer people within the
different tasks rather than
things and in particular it's 1.4 times
likely to prefer people over things than
people who have experience now as
mentioned in the abstract however women
are 2.7 times more likely to prefer
people over things compared to men in
this particular study now if we look at
the combination of those two so
specifically women without prior
programming experience they are 3.8
times more likely to prefer people over
things however because there were four
different tasks involved with this
particular study they do note that these
preferences depend on the actual tasks
at hand so what would be interesting is
to do some follow-up to look at each
specific type of task and do some more
studies on different comparisons of
those to try and figure out why is it
that some people prefer people on this
particular task but not necessarily on
this other particular task all right so
here's a quote from page 136 quote in
all four tasks the median woman whether
experienced or not exhibits a preference
highest probability for the people
version the males in comparison exhibits
a less consistent preference the median
man experienced or not leans towards the
people version for task 1 but towards
the things version and task two and four
for task three the inexperienced median
man prefers the people version albeit
less pronounced than all of the women
whereas experienced men express a slight
preference for things end quote alright
so on page 137-138 they provide some
discussion on some of the internal and
external threats to validity which to be
honest is probably one of the better
discussions i've seen on any of the
papers i've read so far on this podcast
and just in general and research so i
really appreciate their discussion on
this and the thought that went behind
trying to control for potential biases
and then finally we get to the
conclusion on page 139 and there's one
quote that i want to read in particular
and that is quote a strong preference
for things oriented tasks was visible
only in the case of experienced men end
quote okay so that kind of gets into
some of the lingering questions and
thoughts that i have for this particular
article so i previously did an unpacking
scholarship paper that talked about
eliminating gender bias and computer
science education materials so in that
particular study the authors mention
that there is bias in names being used
and pronouns in imagery for example
using imagery that sexualizes women in
some of the computer science materials
that are often used in
like undergraduate cs courses and so
they problematize this and provide some
recommendations for
trying to get rid of some of that bias
that is in ecs materials and in
particular in relation to gender so one
of the things that they recommend is to
use animal names instead of a person's
name they also recommend using pictures
of monuments and other things like that
instead of people because the pictures
of people might have problematic
associations like the sexualization that
i mentioned and then they also recommend
using the singular they pronoun instead
of he or she pronouns so a question that
i have is if the authors from this paper
that i just read for you were to engage
in a discussion with the authors from
that other unpacking scholarship episode
i did on eliminating gender bias and
computer science education materials
what would the author say in particular
i'm interested in okay so instead of
using a person how would this study have
compared between people and animals as
the other authors mentioned instead of
people and things but also what kind of
imagery might we recommend so the other
authors mentioned doing monuments
instead of people so like a pyramid
instead of a person reading a book but
how those compare when i attended icer i
really enjoyed this particular paper
because one it was just really well done
but also two because it kind of
contradicts some of the recommendations
from that previous episode that i did
now if you aren't steeped in educational
research you can find many arguments
around the same topic that will argue
completely opposite things so i'm
providing this particular episode to
basically say like hey while that other
paper had some recommendations that
might be good this paper has a
recommendation that might change that or
might be different but because it's
different demographics of people like
different locations different ages
things like that we can't really
generalize and say well this one is more
valid than another or this one's more
generalizable than another but instead
what we can do is just engage in a
conversation as a field to go hey we
need to talk about this more let's do
more research let's have more
conversations and let's try and figure
out how we can actually try and
eliminate gender bias from a
multi-perspective list approach in other
words from many different angles by the
way if you haven't listened to that
unpacking scholarship that i previously
did i include a link to it in the show
notes under the resources which speaking
of i don't really have any more
lingering questions or thoughts for this
particular article because i've already
kind of talked about the similar topic
previously so check out that episode for
some more questions for example my
discussion on well how might non-binary
individuals have responded to this
particular study which by the way you
can find a link to this in the show
notes in the app that you're listening
to this on or by going to jaredlery.com
where there are hundreds if not
thousands of free resources for you to
use for computer science education
anyways i know this was a shorter
episode but i hope you got something out
of it and i hope you are considering the
different ways that gender is
represented or discussed not only in the
materials that you use in your classroom
but also in how you talk about computer
science with students that you work with
thank you so much for listening to this
particular episode stay tuned next week
for another episode and until then i
hope you're all staying safe and are
having a wonderful week
Article
Christensen, I. M., Marcher, M. H., Grabarcyzk, P., Graversen, T., & Brabrand, C. (2021). Computing Educational Activities Involving People Rather Than Things Appeal More to Women (Recruitment Perspective). International Computing Education Research (ICER), 127–144.
Abstract
“There is a strong need for a more equal gender balance within the computing field. In 1998, Richard A. Lippa uncovered a relationship between gender and preference within the People–Things spectrum, with women preferring People-oriented activities to a higher degree than men. The aim of this paper is twofold. First of all, we wish to determine if a similar relation can be established in the particular context of computing educational activities. Second of all, we wish to see if Lippa’s findings can be extrapolated to contemporary high-school students. To do that, we designed and conducted an experiment involving around 500 Danish high-school students who have been asked to choose between a People-themed version vs an isomorphic Things-themed version of four activities representative for computing education. The results show that the odds of a woman preferring a task involving People is 2.7 times higher than those of a man. The odds of a student without prior programming experience preferring a task involving People is 1.4 times higher than those of a student with programming experience. If we compare women without programming experience to men with programming experience the effect is even more pronounced; indeed, the combined effect is 3.8 (2.7 × 1.4). Our study implies a recommendation for computing educators to, whenever possible, favor educational activities involving People over Things. This makes educational activities appeal more to female students (and to students without programming experience), while not making a difference for male students (or students with programming experience). Since the experiment measured only the appeal of tasks (the users were not expected to perform them) the results we obtained can be useful for recruitment processes where the overall image and appeal of material makes a difference.”
Author Keywords
Recruitment, computing, computer science, software engineering, STEM, education, student experiments, diversity, gender
My One Sentence Summary
This study investigated the preferences of high school males and females for computing educational activities with people or things.
Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts
If the authors from this paper were to engage in a discussion with the authors from the unpacking scholarship episode I did on the paper titled “Eliminating Gender Bias in Computer Science Education Materials,” what would they say?
Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode
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