Despite numerous CS education pedagogical interventions, the pipeline of Black women in Computing has not increased, which illustrates the need to address structural issues (such as racism, sexism, power, and privilege) that impact Black women’s inter- sectional identities. Without honest conversations about power relations within the field of Computing, one cannot expect to en- gender social change that equates to equity for all CS students. Leveraging intersectionality as a critical framework, we interview 18 Black women about their experiences navigating the comput- ing education ecosystem. Intersectional analysis of Black women’s experiences reveals that CS education consists of saturated sites of violence in which interconnected systems of power converge to enact oppression. Findings reveal three saturated sites of violence within CS education: 1. traditional K-12 classrooms; 2. predom- inantly White institutions; and 3. internships as supplementary learning experiences.
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This content will become publicly available on June 30, 2025
Retaining Black Women in Computing: A Comparative Analysis of Interventions for Computing Persistence
Black women remain severely underrepresented in computing despite ongoing efforts to diversify the field. Given that Black women exist at the intersection of both racial and gendered identities, tailored approaches are necessary to address the unique barriers Black women face in computing. However, it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate the efficacy of interventions designed to retain Black women in computing, since samples of computing students typically contain too few Black women for robust statistical analysis. Using about a decade of student survey responses from an National Science Foundation–funded Broadening Participation in Computing alliance, we use regression analyses to quantitatively examine the connection between different types of interventions and Black women’s intentions to persist in computing and how this compares to other students (specifically, Black men, white women, and white men). This comparison allows us to quantitatively explore how Black women’s needs are both distinct from—and similar to—other students. We find that career awareness and faculty mentorship are the two interventions that have a statistically significant, positive correlation with Black women’s computing persistence intentions. No evidence was found that increasing confidence or developing skills/knowledge was correlated with Black women’s computing persistence intentions, which we posit is because Black women must be highly committed and confident to pursue computing in college. Last, our results suggest that many efforts to increase the number of women in computing are focused on meeting the needs of white women. While further analyses are needed to fully understand the impact of complex intersectional identities in computing, this large-scale quantitative analysis contributes to our understanding of the nuances of Black women’s needs in computing.
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- PAR ID:
- 10543986
- Publisher / Repository:
- Transactions on Computing Education
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Computing Education
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1946-6226
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 25
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Purpose To address these limitations, we examined how Latina, Latino, and White women and men students' engagement in engineering was informed by their intersecting identities and within their institutional setting over the course of a year.
Method We interviewed 32 Latina, Latino, and White women and men undergraduate engineering students attending 11 different predominantly White and Hispanic Serving Institutions. Thematic analysis was used to interpret themes from the data.
Results Our findings illustrate how Latinas, Latinos, and White women developed a strong engineering identity, which was critical to their engagement in engineering. Students' engineering identity was grounded in their perceived fit within engineering culture, sense of purpose for pursuing their degree, and resistance to the dominance of White male culture in engineering. Latinas described unique forms of gendered, racialized marginalization in engineering, whereas Latinas and Latinos highlighted prosocial motivations for completing their degree.
Conclusions Findings suggest that institutional cultures, norms, and missions are critical to broadening participation of Latinas, Latinos, and White women in engineering. Disrupting White male culture, leveraging Latiné students' cultural wealth, and counter‐framing traditional recruitment pitches for engineering appear to be key in these efforts.
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