Career Priorities and the Challenge of Recruiting Women to Computing

Misconceptions, lack of awareness, and lack of accurate information about computing occupations may lead women to reject or fail to even consider a career in computing. We document the compatibility between computing occupations and the shared and gendered career priorities of undergraduate college students. To assess students’ career priorities, we analyze data from the Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE) project, which surveyed 7505 undergraduates across the United States. Then, we use occupational data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics to demonstrate that computing occupations offer many of the features that women identify as being important to their future career satisfaction. This type of information is needed to inform the teachers, counselors, and parents who advise young women, and to enable young women themselves to make informed choices about whether to pursue a career in computing. Finally, we discuss actions that educators and others can take to build women’s confidence in their ability to succeed in computing, and to counteract the stereotypes of computing that are most likely to deter women from considering a computing career.