Promotion Materials for Computer Science Courses

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What is the Action?

Make information about your computing courses appealing to female applicants.

Explore another action that deals with advertising of computer science courses – Use of Images in Computer Science Course Promotion.

Quick Facts to Support this Action

Significantly less women than men chose modules containing the word “lab” (e.g., Java Lab) in a study analysing gender differences for non-core computing subjects.

    Ways to Implement this Action

    Explore ideas on implementation by expanding the opntions below.

    ➤ Gender-Neutral Language

    Use gender-neutral language when composing course descriptions that are meant for prospective applicants. Some guidelines on that are available for English and other languages here https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/151780/GNL_Guidelines_EN.pdf

    ➤ Avoid Words…

    Avoid a frequent use of words such as “work”, “programming”, “systems”, “lab”, or “mathematics” and concentrating on people/companies related words instead. If there are existing course promotion materials available already, review them. The word cloud generator can be helpful to see what words are used the most https://www.freewordcloudgenerator.com/generatewordcloud

    ➤ Include Statistics

    Include (ideally positive) statistics on gender representation among students or staff, in course promotion, if applicable.

    ➤ Mention Career Portal

    Include links or information on the university career portal in the course advertisement as it could help prospective students familiarise themselves with the future job prospects.

    Evaluation Approach

    Seeing increased application numbers among female students will be the most evident way to see the impact of this action.

    For a shorter-term impact assessment, survey existing students on opinions about the changes made. Proposed ideas for survey questions:

    1. Overall, how appealing do you find the Computer Science course advertising materials? (Likert scale from Very appealing to Not appealing at all)

    2. How well do the materials represent diversity and inclusivity (e.g., showing different genders, backgrounds, interests)? (Likert scale from Very well to Not at all)

    3. To what extent do the materials make you feel that Computer Science is a field where women can succeed and belong? (Likert scale from Very strongly to Not at all)

    4. Which aspects of the materials are most effective for engaging you?
    (Examples such as visual design, representation of people, emphasis on career opportunities/real world applications etc.)

    5. What changes or additions would make the course advertising materials more appealing to you personally?

    CompTIA. How to attract women (into Computer Science). ChannelPro Network, 2023. Retrieved: https://www.channelpronetwork.com/blog/entry/how-attract-women-computer-science

    P. Grabarczyk, A. Freiesleben, A. Bastrup, and C. Brabrand. Computing Educational Programmes with more Women are more about People & less about Things. In Proc. of the 27th ITiCSE, pages 172–178. ACM, 2022.

    H. Hong and A. Bouchon. Women who choose computer science: what really matters. Technical Report. Google, Inc., 2014.

    M. Kordaki and I. Berdousis. Course selection in computer science: Gender differences. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 116:4770–4774, 2014.

    K. Xu, D. Wendell, and A. S. Walsh. Getting to gender parity in a top-tier mech eng dept: A case study. In ASEE Annu. Conf. Expo., pages 1–24. ASEE, 2017.

    Gender-Neutral Language in the European Parliament. 2018. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/151780/GNL_Guidelines_EN.pdf