Back in 2020, Madison Brigham and me looked into potential gender differences in class participation in two core CS courses, which led to the publication of a paper at the ACM ITiCSE 2021 conference. You can read more about this first paper here. In a nutshell, we found that male students dominated the most public forms of participation, such as lecture and online class forum participation.

Then the pandemic happened and as we continued studying these gender differences for the same two core CS courses, which were now taught remotely, we noticed a dramatic change. For the first time, male and female students were participating at the same rate on the online class forum.

To understand what could have be driving changes in such participation behavior, we ran a survey with students enrolled in some of these online classes. While we found that students of both genders tended to compare themselves to their peers less when classes were online, we also found that this trend was much more accentuated for females than males. This data suggested that observed female participation habits in typical in-person classes were not inherent gender differences, but rather, a product of the environment.

Despite our best efforts, this study was rejected twice from top CS Education conferences (ACM SIGCSE TS and ACM ITiCSE) in 2022. Unfortunately, it was never resubmitted as Maddii (the main author) graduated at the end of 2022, and the rationale for studying the effects of the pandemic was beginning to diminish. However, I’m happy to announce that our paper is now available on arXiv and will hopefully still be able to reach its intended audience.