Investigating why few women are choosing Single honours Computer Science courses

📄 Project Abstract

There is a distinct problem of women not wanting to study Computer Science, as shown by enrollment data from the University of Leeds. It has been the subject of much research as to why this is happening in the wider world and what to do about it. This project aims to look at why women are choosing not to study Single honours Computer Science courses but appear to be willing to at least try Joint honours programmes. It considers a variety of different reasons as to why women will choose a particular course structure from a variety of different sources. This study included primary ('new' data) research and also looked at multitudes of secondary information sources. Interviews were carried out on both male and female first year undergraduate students that were either on Single honours courses or on a Joint honours course with the student enrolled for part of their course in the School of Computing. Several contributing factors were found that attempted to explain this choice of structure;...