The direction toward a sustainable and more balanced society asks for higher engagement of diverse people in innovation, shedding light on the critically low number of women choosing computer science (CS) education and career. Despite interventions by the research community, governmental, and educational institutions all aimed at increasing gender diversity in CS over the past two decades, the gender gap seems to hold [13].

Although progress in the higher involvement of women in CS is barely visible, we are starting to understand the reasons and myths behind the trend. Harvey Mudd’s president, Maria Klawe, has summarized their experience as: “Number one is they think it’s not interesting. Number two, they think they wouldn’t be good at it. Number three, they think they will be working with a number of people that they just wouldn’t feel comfortable or happy working alongside” [11]. Although the negative view of CS and the confidence gap, as described by Maria Klawe, play their role in narrowing the number of girls interested in CS, we see that there is still a substantial number of girls and women enthusiasts who would like to pursue CS careers [7] but get discouraged by unnecessary frustrations they experience along the way.

This chapter elaborates on these frustrations, all of which seem to be preventable, and goes further by summarizing the existing knowledge on effective interventions to target and mitigate them in CS education. The intent is to provide educators with a comprehensive and easy-to-navigate map of the interventions, as well as highlight the most promising solutions, such as the interdisciplinary approach, that could be of tremendous help in engaging girls in CS. Readers will gain better understanding of frustrations of girls in CS and orientation in the recommendations for CS educators committed to sparking and retaining the interest and participation of girls in their classes.

Frustrations Steering Girls Away from CS

What is CS lacking that makes girls self-select away from it and seek other interests? To answer this question, we had to understand the perceived frustrations that women themselves report as the reasons they dropped out of CS education despite being keen about it in general. To this end, we have designed and used a retrospective questionnaire study, which has revealed numerous interesting insights about frustrations that women interested in computing experience along different phases of their education and career. The admirable ability of participants to retrospect on their previous experiences helped us follow a pattern in the responses and, based on their reports, identify the causes that underlie women’s attrition in CS.

The study was realized via a questionnaire (in English), designed to understand how and why women engage with CS, as well as the challenges girls and women face when participating in CS activities at school or at home and factors that enable their entry and ongoing participation in the further education. The questionnaire consisted of a number of questions, including six open questions asking the respondents to retrospect and analyze their previous studies and ambitions. These questions asked about participants’ understanding of who computer scientists are, what were the drivers and obstacles on their way to CS, what makes them enthusiastic about it, and what they would recommend improving CS education for girls. The results presented here are based on the responses to these open questions (quoted as written), in combination with basic classification questions about participants’ age, gender, and major interests. We distributed the questionnaire among groups with the affinity toward CS, especially educational institutions providing late-education offers (for adult women), such as Czechitas (www.czechitas.cz).

We successfully collected 139 responses from womenFootnote 1 in three age groups (18% between 18 and 26, 41% between 27 and 34, 33% over 34 years old, and 8% without age indication). This study’s population was represented by a near-even distribution of respondents over three regions: the Czech Republic, Germany, and others (constituting one-third of the responses, however, distributed all around the world in small numbers). The questionnaire resonated with the audience, 90% of respondents filled out all the open questions, and many did it very thoughtfully and expressively. The responses were distributed among three groups: (1) women who studied and stayed in computing, 39% of respondents; (2) women who transitioned to computing later in life, after studying another discipline, 32% of respondents; and (3) women who never considered entering computing, 29% of respondents.

We narrowed our attention to the frustrations more strongly reported by women from the second group. We specifically looked for respondents who likely had high potential to study CS in their earlier years (manifested by expressing previous interest, however, decided to study another discipline and returned to CS later in life), which makes our study different from other similar studies, for example, [2, 9, 17]. To find out what made them select away at the first place, we compared their responses with the women who stayed in – focusing on their views of the moments that formed the direction they decided to take (stay in or disengage, although overall interested in it). We were asking them to elaborate retrospectively about the biggest obstacles and drivers on girls’ way to CS [15].

Thus, what is CS lacking that makes women seek other interests and study programs and professions as an alternative to CS? Firstly, the participants reported, on average, five other major interests (languages, biology, mathematics, sociology, psychology, business, history, and music are most common) competing for their attention with CS at that time, which made it easy for them to simply skip CS as an option and focus on other interests that took the space in their thoughts and time. A typical quote illustrating this is: “In retrospect, I’d like there to be someone who noticed that I had my head on computers and kept me there. I had a lot of other interests, guitar twice a week, and volleyball twice a week. I took computers like, ‘Yeah, I’d probably like that,’ but I had a lot of other things.” In many cases they reported on the early dilemma whether to follow their other interests or CS. Those who were still considering CS as one of the preferred options concluded that choosing CS meant leaving all their other interests behind, which they did not want to do. This also indicates what “engaging education” means to them. They want to understand technology as the means to have relatable impact in other areas of their interest as well, not for the sake of technology as the end goal.

Table 25-1 The most mentioned categories of obstacles on their way to CS
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Secondly, the three factors hindering girls’ entrance in CS brought in the quote by Maria Klawe (see the introduction and [11]), that is, stereotypes, confidence, and sense of belonging, were confirmed by the responses of the participants and also by other existing studies, which further add early access as a factor [19]. These factors were the first items added to our list of codes in the first cycle of our exploratory analysis. The qualitative responses were coded based on these four factors. Within our code structure, besides the four key codes that we used initially to structure the discussion of the responses, a fifth factor emerged from analyzing the responses, being feeling valued as women in computing careers. The identified categories with examples of quotes in the results of the study are outlined in Table 25-1.

Thirdly, when trying to understand what made them select away from CS in the first place, we found the following reasons as most prevalent: the vast majority of 92% of participants in the second group were missing suitable courses to learn about computing; 58% of them were concerned about the possibility to follow their other multidisciplinary interests despite learning computing; and 18% of them could not relate to computing at all because of other interests that took the space in their thoughts and time. Thus, the funnel into CS education is leaky. When following the major leaks, there is a likelihood those girls will not have access to an engaging educational offer in the area of their interest, a likelihood that they will be convinced that they and their interests do not fit and are not connected to CS, a likelihood of that they falsely believe that because of having other interests and not investing all their time into computing they cannot be as successful as others in CS, or a likelihood that they experience their non-stereotypical skills and interests being considered second-class and the advantage of having them not being understood and appreciated in CS.

Effective Interventions to Engage Girls in CS

To respond to reported reasons girls dropped out of CS education, we looked for the existing knowledge on effective interventions to target and mitigate experienced frustrations in CS education. The effective interventions to recruit and retain girls in CS education include interventions that combat wrong gender-related stereotypes, interventions that spark initial interest by providing suitable access through actively engaging interdisciplinary strengths for relatable purposes, interventions managing suitable first contact through relatable activities compensating for missing access, interventions for creating a less hostile environment through building a sense of belonging, interventions increasing self-confidence, and interventions for sustaining long-term commitment, as we have summarized in [16] accumulating joined knowledge from over 800 publications via a cumulative review of literature on the topic. With that position, we have also recognized that education design can actively use numerous techniques (see Table 25-2) to attract and retain girls engaged during the education process. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the area of CS education by summarizing proven teaching interventions that support diverse and inclusive CS.

Our results show that one of the most powerful elements, resulting in student participation and retention, is interest [1, 8, 18]. Interest energizes the learning process, guides the learning trajectory, and is crucial for the success of the overall endeavor. We hence organized the identified recommendations according to the phases in which interest is cultivated and evolves into confidence and commitment. Table 25-2 maps this conceptual model of interest emergence showing how interventions promote its development and subsequent goals in five chronological phases.

Targeting gender-related stereotypes: The research by [14] shows that teachers and classrooms that do not make explicit efforts to provide a women-friendly environment for exploring CS will naturally end up promoting CS as a male-oriented domain. It is being acknowledged as a result of the differences in leisure-time preferences among girls vs. boys [19]. Girls usually start using a computer much later, for homework, research, and socializing, while at that time, boys already tend to have a few more years of experience with computers [19], which makes it hard to reverse differences in computing literacy. In effect of that, boys, who are on average one year ahead of girls in computer usage, according to the findings, tend to monopolize the instructor’s time, computer labs, and the curriculum material [5, 26, 28]. This situation leads to even fewer opportunities to gain experience and increase their confidence with computers, which can be observed among girls as well as among less experienced boys. When students, whether girls or boys, fall into this vicious circle [27], it is not very likely they escape it without the explicit initiative of the school and parents who would create an engaging environment effectively pulling these kids back into CS education. As girls fall into this vicious circle more often than boys, it is natural to ask what the girl-friendly CS education environment looks like and what requirements it poses on the curriculum, culture, and overall environment. Recs. 1.1.–1.4. list interventions that could be applied by teachers to prepare positive conditions for interest to emerge and combat the negative gender-related stereotypes in their classroom.

Table 25-2 Effective interventions to promote diversity in CS
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Targeting missing access: The preference for other subjects may be attributed to the fact that what makes an appealing first contact with computers for boys is not that appealing for girls. Girls hence opt out from this first attraction and start exploring CS only later [19]; however, at that time they often feel behind. Little research exists on what could be an appealing first contact with computers for girls. A successful example, which is, however, connected to a slightly later age, is interdisciplinary explanatory activities [12, 26]. Girls also tend to be good at typical school achievements, for example, using a computer for homework and writing assignments [19, 26]. Hence, they tend to be attracted to computing once they understand it as a tool impacting their potential academic achievements in all disciplines as a way to test hypotheses and a resource of new knowledge [26]. Attempts should be made to help girls understand these benefits of CS early, showing them CS as a facilitator toward their goals and activities that are naturally appealing to them [4, 19, 21, 26]. The mentioned interventions Recs. 2.1–2.2. include providing girls with exciting and engaging hands-on experiences, increasing motivation to pursue computing through emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature and the social impact of computing work [5, 10, 12, 19, 23, 24, 26], introducing girls to positive role models [4], offering relatable access to CS, and providing information to teachers to encourage interest in computing.

The most common approach to teaching CS is to gradually engage in programming through a process of solving tasks, from very simple to more complex ones [12]. For many girls, this process might make it very difficult to achieve real intellectual satisfaction, which may be a significant obstacle in retaining girls in computing, as this way of thinking degrades digital literacy to pure coding literacy [12]. CS is, however, not only about coding. It requires fundamental skills, such as creativity, imagination, innovation, solution design and problem-solving, understanding of human behavior and needs, experience design, and a combination of mathematical and engineering thinking, to use concepts of computer science effectively [12, 19]. An endeavor to present computer science as a tool to realize and scale any idea, originating from and innovating any discipline possible and available, to anyone independent of previous coding expertise seems to be the key to bringing girls to understand the opportunities in computing and space for their creativity. There is no silver bullet to solve this problem, and it will not merely fix itself with time. A well-designed package of interventions (Recs. 2.1. –2.2. and 3.1. –3.4.) is needed in each classroom for all the students who otherwise miss the opportunities provided by computing in any discipline.

Targeting missing sense of belonging: Works exist that examine the benefits of students’ separation into groups within the classroom, allowing educators to tailor CS education to meet students’ needs best. Research suggests that the separation of classes based on gender (Rec. 4.1.) [3, 12, 14] has a similar effect as separation based on previous experience (Rec. 4.2.) [26]. This needs further investigation. All-girls classrooms are shown to be beneficial for adolescent girls (as well as adult women) [6, 7] to create a safe environment when entering CS education and building the initial confidence, making it easier to experiment and express their creativity freely. Teachers need to implement preventive measures to ensure that no group of students can monopolize lessons based solemnly on their preferences [3]. Girls are likely to have a purposeful and value-based approach to technology, which distances them from the stereotype they perceive as necessary when seeking success in computing, of being fascinated and passionate about the technology itself. Many girls might find it easier to find their way to technology in homogeneous girl groups, while in mixed groups, their self-image might be a hindrance [12]. On the other hand, this measure might not be easy to implement. To overcome the practicality burden, segregation by experience could serve the purpose in classes where segregation by gender is not practically feasible.

Existing research suggests that the learning environment and the signals girls receive in the classroom play a critical role in determining their interest in computing [4]. The strategies to make the environment less hostile for girls are of enormous impact. According to the examined literature, educators need to work to diminish the usual informal hierarchy and defensive climate based on computing skills, which may take place in CS education [19], and need to install a growth mindset (Rec. 5.2.) [4], where everyone can genuinely believe that they can improve, having a positive and constructive attitude toward failure (Rec. 5.3.) [4], with the failure being seen as an opportunity to improve.

Targeting missing confidence: Girls’ leisure-time preferences show not only that girls are statistically better in collaborative and social tasks but they prefer to participate in such activities more [24]. This opens a way to provide low-stakes opportunities (Rec. 5.1.) [4, 24] for girls to succeed in solving classroom tasks and see themselves as contributors to the solution. This could be achieved, for example, by creating more opportunities for discussion and presentation of solution design, making these skills (which are also seen as crucial for success in a computing career) an integral part of the feeling of success in computing [4]. It seems that if the competencies in which girls tend to excel become part of the CS education design, we can stimulate and facilitate the identification of girls with computing, even for girls who might be stronger in other skills than those we stereotypically link to computing. This is actually in alignment with the situation in the computing industry, where a diverse cohort of individuals is needed to build various teams, involved in product design, implementation, testing, and management, making the soft skills of similar importance to the hard technical skills for success in computing (Rec. 3.4.) [12].

Targeting frustration of not feeling valued: In general, the contribution of girls in computer science is not as widely acknowledged as it could be. Despite the fact that women have made significant contributions to the field throughout its history, they are often underrepresented in the field, and their contributions are often not given the same level of recognition or visibility as those of men. This is partly due to the fact that computer science is a field that has traditionally been male-dominated, and as a result, the perspectives and contributions of women may not be as well-represented in the literature, in the classroom, or in the industry. Even if the contributions of women are presented and recognized often, they map the expectations for recognition defined by the male majority. In fact, differences in leisure-time activities at a very young age influence stance toward CS later in life and result in different experiences of impact, understanding of the valued contribution, and expectations for recognition. Girls seem to need more appealing purposeful contact with a computer [19, 21]; they tend to be more interested in and recognize, as achievements from others as well from themselves, computing contribution that solves social and humanitarian problems and are more motivated when they can see the impact of their work. This mismatched understanding of success may attribute to the fact that what makes an appealing challenge for boys is not that appealing for girls; girls hence opt out from this attraction and look for having their contribution somewhere else [19], where they feel that their contributions to the discussion are valued by the community or their understanding of having impact fits.

The study in [26] analyzed successful extracurricular activities and concluded that the provision of pedagogically effective extracurricular activities in the long term requires unsustainable high effort. It usually either results in ending the activity too early or in limiting the effort to a one-shot intervention with no long-term effect. The study pointed out that the integration of such activities in a regular CS education classroom is a goal without which a change can hardly be achieved. However, to reach this goal, professional teacher development programs need to be introduced that equip the teachers with the knowledge, easy-to-use tools, and guidelines (Recs. 6.1.-6.5.) and provide information to teachers to encourage interest in computing (Recs. 6.2.-6.3.). The teachers need this guidance to build up the necessary confidence and, hence, be able to transfer their confidence to motivate students into a career in computer science [5, 10, 24, 26].

Several programs, initiatives, and interventions have been launched to address women’s underrepresentation in computer science. At the high-school level, several studies observe differences in computer science course behavior between male and female adolescents [4, 12, 19, 24]. Girls are observed to be less likely to choose computer science courses due to classroom environments perceived by them as hostile to their way of self-expression and achievement understanding. The related stereotypical images and messages, as well as individual interactions in the classroom, reduce girls’ sense of belonging. Effective intervention strategies often include providing girls with engaging hands-on experiences, increasing motivation to pursue computing through emphasizing the social impact of computing work, providing girls opportunities to succeed with their strengths, introducing girls to positive but relatable role models, and providing training to teachers and key individuals to encourage greater interest in computing and technology. If given the necessary support through professional development programs, educators could react and adapt. For the moment, CS education might be the essential factor that can be changed to influence the recruitment and retention of girls in computing. Yet, sufficient pedagogical guidance is essential to make this endeavor successful.

Conclusion

Overall, there is a silver lining connected to these pipeline leaks – multidisciplinarity. The women in the study showed to have many other interests, on average 5.5 other major interests besides computing. Thus, the possible time slot where computing could be practiced was immediately filled with another without further conscious notice by the girls. There is thus a potential to create alternative pathways [25] into the field by merely building on individual interests. As many women find it hard to identify themselves with computing as such (also indicated by the confidence gap and missing sense of belonging), we might want to leverage their personal interests to create identities that do resonate. We suggest that a different learning approach, that is, interdisciplinary approach [22], could have a particularly strong potential for strengthening women’s engagement in computing. These different interdisciplinary subcultures can provide an environment where all the students who currently feel left behind can learn CS without feeling trapped by the dominant culture associated with the field nowadays. This would further expand different entryways in computing and help students be more comfortable exploring and experimenting with computing, have the stability of a familiar knowledge base, and have the ability to self-identify with relevant problems. While mixing the “unfamiliar with the familiar,” they might be more intrigued when unexpected things happen and feel more competent because of the possibility of explaining the new findings using their strengths in a familiar context. Interdisciplinary approaches could further enrich formal education by integrating other sciences and humanities, promoting versatility for future workplaces and real innovation, which can hardly be achieved without computing crossing its own boundaries. Thus, we should stop compartmentalizing learning by discipline and inquire with the help of computing across boundaries. Real innovation also requires the divergent skills that are the focus of arts and humanities. Without these broader skills, it is very difficult to apply any solutions to problems in the real world.

Our comprehensive overview of interventions points to some exciting directions in the field of CS education. Computer science encompasses many perspectives: it is creative and social and provides for well-paid and often interdisciplinary careers. Future CS education research needs to demonstrate the usefulness of CS in contributing to solving critical societal, natural, and economic challenges. There are many interesting opportunities for women to engage in this field.