Factors Afecting Female Students Motivation Related to Enrollment and Retention in Information Technology Courses

• Main Authors: Meirylane Rosa Emidio Avelino, Luciana Cardoso de Castro Salgado, Karina Mochetti, Raquel Bravo, Carla Faria Leitao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro Latinoamericano de Estudios en Informática 2019-08-01
• Series: CLEI Electronic Journal
• Subjects: engagement; women in computer science; gender gap
• Online Access: http://www.clei.org/cleiej/index.php/cleiej/article/view/218

The difficulty of including women in a male dominated environment is a current problem, leading to important factors such as the role of women in society, whose rules were always imposed and created by men. Specifically in the Information Technology (IT) field, there have been a growing concern as projects are being created with the main goal of studying this issue and reverse it. This work explores what motivated undergraduate students of Computer Science and Information Systems courses of Fluminense Federal University (UFF) to choose this area and how they are experiencing the first years in college. This research was conducted with a qualitative methodology in order to understand the main fears and difficulties they had while choosing those courses and how they are dealing with a mostly male environment. Our results are based on activities from #include <meninas.uff> project, organized by female professors at UFF to attract more girls to technology courses and to support undergraduate students already enrolled. The female students affect by the project show to appreciate how it is raising an important question about the gender gap and the issues they have faced since they chose a course in the IT field.