| Popis: |
We examine the gender balance of students in the Computer Science programme at a prominent Caribbean university---with campuses in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad---from three perspectives: enrollment, retention and completion. In the US, in 2011, females accounted for approximately 17.7% of all graduands with a computing degree. These numbers are considered low, especially since when all subjects are taken into account, women account for more than 50% of American college graduates. On one campus of the Caribbean University, for the same year, the proportion of females graduating in Computer Science was 44.2%. These numbers are higher than the US national averages, even after normalizing them for the high female student population on the campus (approximately 70%). We introduce the notion of gender neutrality to represent these normalized ratios. Notably, we did not observe any statistically significant difference in the average performance of males and that of females, which is similar to the result found in the US. We discuss the methods that we used to make these comparisons. |
