Addressing the "Leaky Pipeline": A Review and Categorisation of Actions to Recruit and Retain Women in Computing Education

TL;DR

This paper reviews and categorizes various initiatives aimed at increasing the recruitment and retention of women in computing education, highlighting the need for better evaluation of their effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive categorization of actions to address the leaky pipeline in computing education, facilitating future planning and assessment.

Findings

Actions are categorized into Policy, Pedagogy, Influence and Support, Promotion and Engagement.

Many initiatives lack rigorous evaluation of their impact.

The work paves the way for developing a toolkit of effective actions.

Abstract

Gender imbalance in computing education is a well-known issue around the world. The term "leaky pipeline" is often used to describe the lack of retention of women before they progress to senior roles. Numerous initiatives have targeted the problem of the leaky pipeline in recent decades. This paper provides a comprehensive review of initiatives related to techniques used to boost recruitment and retention of women in undergraduate computing and related courses in higher education. The primary aim was to identify interventions or initiatives (which we called "actions") that have shown some effectiveness. A secondary objective was to structure our findings as a categorisation, in order to enable future action discussion, comparison and planning. A particular challenge faced in a significant portion of the work was the lack of evaluation: i.e. the assessment of the direct relationship between the initiatives and the outcomes on retention or recruitment. The actions were categorised into four groups: Policy, Pedagogy, Influence and Support and Promotion and Engagement. Policy actions need support and potentially structural change at institution level. Pedagogy actions are initiatives related to the teaching of computing courses. The Influence and Support category includes actions associated with ways to influence women to choose computing and once enrolled to support and encourage them to stay. Finally, Promotion and Engagement actions are initiatives to promote computing based courses and involve engagement and outreach activities. We present our categorisation, identifying the literature related to actions under each category and subcategory. We discuss the challenges with evaluating the direct impact of actions and outline how this work leads towards the next phase of our work - a toolkit of actions to promote retention and recruitment of women in computing undergraduate courses.