Women in Introductory Computer Science: Experience at Victoria University of Wellington

This paper documents efforts that the department has made to support women students between 1991 and the 1996. Our major goal has been to reduce the high withdrawal rate of women students in our entry level course in computer science. We describe the approaches that have been taken to address this concern, and present the data which has been collected to track the results of our efforts. Our data suggests that providing a gender neutral content is not enough to ensure that men and women will retain similarly. In this paper we suggest policies which we feel may be beneficial in achieving similar male and female retention rates. Publishing Information This report will be presented at the Twenty-Eighth ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium. San Jose, CA, USA. February, 1 Introduction The department of computer science at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) has been concerned about the success rate of women in COMP102, our first course for Computer Science majors. Proportionally more wome..