Understanding Students' Experience and Perception of Gender Bias in a Software Engineering Education Environment

The Software Engineering (SE) workforce is still man-dominated, and there are still fewer women students graduating from Computer Science/Software Engineering (CS/SE) courses in most countries. Two major reasons are fewer women enrolling in CS/SE courses and a lower percentage of those women who enrolled completing courses. We wanted to investigate the second reason - the experiences of students within the CS/SE education environment to identify key issues that need improvement to increase women student recruitment and completion. We interviewed 18 CS / SE students to explore their experiences. We requested they review selected SE education content to understand the perception of gender diversity within the SE education environment. Our findings indicate that many women students feel excluded by several behavioural aspects of their fellow men students, as well as by some teachers. We found that gender-biased language and stereotypical images make women students feel more excluded. From the experiences and opinions of our participants, we propose recommendations for higher education CS/SE teachers, universities and researchers to improve gender inclusion in SE teaching environments.