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.

  • 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


Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode



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