Coding Bootcamps: Women Overcoming Intimidation
How do the motivations of women who attend coding bootcamps differ from the motivations of women who attend undergraduate computer science (CS) programs?
A few months ago, I met Sherry Seibel at a computer science education conference (SIGCSE), where she presented preliminary results on this question (abstract, poster). She did a qualitative study where she interviewed four female CS graduates, and four female coding bootcamp graduates, asking them about their experiences.
Here are some of the differences she found between female CS graduates and bootcamp graduates:
- Three of the four CS graduates considered themselves to be be good at math, while none of the bootcamps graduates considered themselves to be good at math
- All bootcamp graduates and only one CS graduate were surprised to find coding was not as difficult as they had expected.
- All graduates do full stack web development. None consider this work to involve “complex math.”
- One CS graduate said they were more comfortable around women, while three bootcamp graduates said they were more comfortable around women.
- All felt negatively affected by “know-it-alls.”
- All now believe coding is a skill anyone can learn.
(These results are consistent with a separate study of 9 women who attended coding bootcamps. The study is unfortunately not currently available online)
From these results, it appears that coding bootcamps can provide an opportunity for women who suffer from a confidence gap and therefore feel intimidated by “math”, “know-it-alls”, and predominately male environments. This confidence gap matches other studies showing that women tend to feel less confident about math and science, even though they are just as capable as men. The women in Sherry’s study who attended coding bootcamps overcame their intimidation, and even learned that some of that intimidation was based on faulty knowledge. In particular they found that their expectations on the the difficulty of coding and the necessity of math did not line up with reality. (Note: another study found that some employers, with jobs requiring less math and theoretical knowledge, preferred bootcamp graduates.)
While it’s good to know that bootcamps are helping some women who are discovering programming later in life, there still remains a larger problem of women feeling intimidated by programming due to a confidence gap and inaccurate information. We need to do better at telling people what programming is, what programming jobs require, and we also need to make our programming environments less intimidating.
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References:
S. Seibel, “Social Motivators and Inhibitors for Women Entering Software Engineering Through Coding Bootcamps vs. Computer Science Bachelor’s Degrees: (Abstract Only),” in Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, New York, NY, USA, 2018, pp. 274–274.
Lyon, L.A., & Green, E. (2018, February). Women’s Attraction to Coding Boot Camps. Lightning talk presented at the IEEE STCB Conference for Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), Baltimore, MD.
Rittmayer, Ashley D., and Margaret E. Beier. “Overview: Self-efficacy in STEM.” SWE-AWE CASEE Overviews (2008): 1–12.
Lindberg, Sara M., et al. “New trends in gender and mathematics performance: a meta-analysis.” Psychological bulletin 136.6 (2010): 1123.
Q. Burke, C. Bailey, L. A. Lyon, and E. Greeen, “Understanding the Software Development Industry’s Perspective on Coding Boot Camps Versus Traditional 4-year Colleges,” in Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, New York, NY, USA, 2018, pp. 503–508.
