Traversing the Undergraduate Curriculum in Computer Science: Where Do Students Stumble?
Sandra Katz, John M. Aronis, Christine Wilson, David W. Allbritton, Mary Lou Soffa · The MIT Press eBooks · 2006
The underrepresentation of females among computer science Bachelor of Science degree recipients is attributed to two main forces: (i) fewer women than men enroll in computer science programs at the undergraduate level; and (ii) attrition, i.e., more women than men leave these programs. This chapter focuses on the attrition aspect. It demonstrates the strong impact of performance on both student persistence in an undergraduate program and the gender gap in persistence. Performance alone does not explain this gap; rather, it is performance at an expected level that is the important factor, and women appear to be more negatively affected than men when their achieved grades do not measure up to their desired grades.