The Social Closure of Undergraduate Computing: Lessons for the Contemporary Enrolment Boom

Abstract

Software engineering and other computing fields have the unfortunate distinction of being areas in which the percentage of women has decreased in recent decades. Each time that undergraduate computing has surged in student demand, the percentage of women has decreased and never recovered. With a new enrolment boom currently ongoing, we were motivated to take a sociohistorical approach to understand how undergraduate CS is gendered. We use Anne Witz's closure theory to explain the gendering of computing, focusing on the history of enrolment booms in computer science. In doing so, we found that the closure of computing is affected by policies (such as admissions policies) and discourses (such as "computing is engineering"). We also found that when computing becomes more closed, the field also becomes more gendered, which has important implications for managing the current enrolment boom.