ICER 2021

On this page, you will find information about our ICER 2021 paper 'Children’s Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes on the Gender, Social Skills, and Interests of a Computer Scientist'. You can find the full research paper in the ACM Digital Library (open access).

We are motivated to do this type of research because of the gender gap in Computer Science: only 27% of computer and mathematical scientists in the United States and 17% of IT specialists in Europe are women. The under-representation of women in the field of Computer Science is, among other things, influenced by stereotypes of computer scientists. In our study, we measured the implicit and explicit stereotypes regarding computer scientists’ gender, social skills and interests of 564 children between the age of 7 and 18. Part of the participants watched a video of a programmer explaining what they do. In this way, we could also measure whether explaining what a computer scientist does affects stereotypes. We found weak implicit stereotypical beliefs on computer scientists’ social skills and moderate implicit stereotypical beliefs on computer scientists’ interests. We also found explicit stereotypes on computer scientists’ gender, social skills and interests. Measuring the effects of the intervention, we found significant differences between the control and experiment groups in their explicit stereotypes on computer scientists’ social skills.

This page serves as an additive to our ICER paper. You can find the anonymized dataset, materials, scripts for analysis and detailed results. If you have any questions or if you want to talk about our study, feel free to contact me.