Gender Influence on Communication Initiated within Student Teams
Rita Garcia, Chieh-Ju Liao, Ariane Pearce, Christoph Treude · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · 2022
Collaboration is important during software development, but related work has found gender differences can influence the collaboration process, creating inequality in the team's dynamics. In this paper, we present a gender analysis study that involved 39 students, examining their teams' online collaborations while contributing to a large open-source software project. Eight teams of 4-6 Software Engineering (SE) students communicated over an online messaging platform, Slack, to complete an eight-week project. The goal of this study is to identify gender differences emerging from team collaboration. A mixed-methods approach was used to collect students' teamwork experiences and analyse their collaboration. Our research shows statistically significant results in female students' leadership, coordination, and project-monitoring behaviours used to complete the project. The results also showed a higher rate of help seeking within the all-female team, an infrequent behaviour observed in the all-male and mixed-gender teams. Our findings raise future research opportunities to further investigate the gender differences emerging from team collaboration.