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the dearth of women in computing by causing women to experience gender bias. These gender stereotypes are doubly disadvantaging to women because they create gender differences in self-assessments of computing ability, decreasing the likelihood that women will persist in Computer Science (CS). This is because students need to believe they have sufficient ability in a field in order to pursue it as a career. Building on decades of Sociological theory, we hypothesized that increasing top-performing women’s self-assessments of computing ability would increase those women’s intentions to persist in computing. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a field experiment in a CS1 class in which the top 50% of students were given additional performance feedback from their instructor via email. The intervention increased these women’s and men’s self-assessed CS ability but only increased the women’s CS persistence intentions. In sum, sending a single email increased top-performing women’s intentions to persist in CS by 18%. A mediation analysis found evidence for the proposed causal path; namely, that the intervention increased the women’s self-assessments of computing ability, which then increased their intentions to persist in computing. This research furthers our knowledge of the processes around self-assessments of ability and career choice that contribute to the dearth of women in CS. It also provides evidence for a lightweight intervention that may increase the number of women in computing, as prior research finds that intentions to persist are highly predictive of actual persistence in STEM fields.