STEM Workforce Development  

STEM Learning and Learning Environments  

Broadening Participation in STEM

Gendered Pathways: From Florida's Two-Year Institutions to Computing Degrees

Effective Years: 2019-2024

This EHR Core Research project will conduct research on women's participation in computing fields, with a focus on community college starters using a comprehensive dataset from Florida's educational institutions and national-level comparable data. Despite the growing demand for computer scientists and engineers, women's representation in this industry remains problematically low while their share of degree earners has declined nationally. In 2014, the most recent year for which U.S. national data are available, the share of women earning bachelor's degrees in computer science was 18.1%, down from 25.1% a decade earlier. Although women constitute the majority of community college starters, and community college students often gravitate towards applied technical and high-growth degree fields, community college pathways have been under-examined as a mechanism for enhancing women's representation in computing and technology. Emerging research has begun to identify secondary school, community college, and baccalaureate curricular pathways as a vehicle to facilitate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) student success, especially for underrepresented women. This project will provide new insights into how students successfully navigate these career pathways by focusing on analyses of community college students in computing in the highly diverse state of Florida. The findings from this study may be used in subsequent research and in the development of interventions to curb the gender gap in computing fields, especially among underrepresented and economically disadvantaged women. The alignment of Florida administrative and U.S. national data may also have meaningful use for scholarly and practitioner communities interested in broadening participation in STEM higher education. This project will fill three critical shortcomings of current research on the gender gap in computing and technology: 1) it focuses solely on computing, which currently has fewer women than other STEM fields and has the most prospects for job growth; 2) because of the amount of data available, the researchers can employ an intersectional approach to understand how various women navigate pathways; and 3) the researchers will focus on the community college experiences and pathways often chosen by many underrepresented groups to enter computing. The research design leverages Florida administrative data and an existing conceptual model, the Momentum for Community College Student Success framework, to follow a diverse population of community college students pursuing computing degrees. The dataset includes postsecondary transcript data coupled with multilayered measures of demographic and family backgrounds and academic history, particularly in high school mathematics and science courses. Administrative datasets offer the advantage of vast statistical power that facilitates nuanced field-specific and intersectional analyses while also examining the differences in the secondary and postsecondary course-taking experiences and outcomes with respect to the timing and consistency of enrollment in postsecondary programs. To contextualize Florida findings, the researchers will also engage in complementary analyses of U.S. national longitudinal data, using the two most recent cohorts of Beginning Postsecondary Students study data. Three types of outcomes will be analyzed with respect to postsecondary attainment outcomes: 1) Attainment of an associate degree in computing-related fields; 2) Transfer to computing related major from a two-year institution to a four-year institution; and 3) Attainment of a bachelor's degree in computing-related fields. The investigator team will use multivariate statistical analyses and quasi-experimental designs to compare the probabilities for men and women graduating with degrees in computing fields as compared to other STEM fields. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

10 Publications Related to This Project: