News

Project Updates

All first year student interviews have been completed, and data analysis was complete as of the end of 2004. While the small size of the interview population at RIT makes it difficult to draw generalizations from our findings at this point, initial analysis of the data in the interviews has revealed some patterns that we intend to explore in the larger-scale questionnaire.

Some of our findings echo work by previous researchers in the area of gendered attrition — the impact of guidance counselors and teachers is significant, with guidance counselors more often being cited as negative factors in the decision to pursue a computing major and/or attend a technical institute, and teachers more often being cited as positive factors. Of particular interest is the fact that while female students in both CS and IT were more likely to describe frustration with first quarter programming classes than were the IT men, the IT women more frequently expressed a sense that the classes seemed irrelevant to their career goals, and were more likely to express doubts over their choice of majors based on the programming component. The CS women, in contrast, were more likely to see programming as a necessary component of their program, and were more accepting of it as a part of their studies.

Of the ten IT women interviewed, three changed programs during the first year — one to Travel and Tourism, and two to transitional programs intended for students unsure of their major. Of the eleven CS women interviewed, four changed programs — two into IT, one into Biotechnology, and one into Sign Language Interpreting. This may indicate that women unhappy with IT programs are more likely to leave the computing field entirely, while women unhappy with CS may be more likely to try other areas of computing if they are unhappy with their first choice of programs.

Since summer 2004, we have been busy at work with the second phase of our study — administering an institutional survey (modeled in part on the CRA Taulbee Study) to collect characteristics of institutions with undergraduate IT programs. Using the newly-developed ABET IT accreditation guidelines, 77 schools have been identified as potential participants based on the existence of degree programs with a (core) curriculum in the areas of programming, networking, database, and web development or multimedia. All currently participating schools have received an informational packet about the study, and we are entering survey results into our database as they come in. In addition to completing the institutional survey, these programs were asked to solicit participation by their female freshman and upperclassman students for a survey that will be administered in the spring.

Research Progress Update

In September we began interviewing freshman women in the IT and CS departments, as well as a randomly selected sample of men in the department. These interviews have focused on general demographic characteristics, as well as the students’ decisions to attend RIT. This first round of interviews will be completed before the end of fall quarter, and we hope to be able to make some preliminary analysis of that material available by the end of winter quarter.

During winter quarter, we will conduct e-mail interviews with all respondents, and in the spring quarter we will conduct another round of in-person interviews.