Abstract:

Computer Science and Engineering studies have been commonly related to men, but that was not always the case. Despite the fact that, during the last century, women constituted a fundamental pillar in development and advances in Information Technology, the reality is that the gender gap in this field is notorious and very serious; the number of female Engineering students has been gradually decreasing in recent decades. As part of a cultural project developed in the University of Jaen (Spain), an exposition of posters about a selection of female pioneers in the field of Computer Science has been exhibited throughout several educational institutions under a tight schedule. These women have made decisive contributions to the field, and many of them have not been recognized enough until recent times, due to gender, cultural and/or social circumstances, among others. Each poster has been carefully designed to tell the story and main milestones of one of these female pioneers through a graphic language based on comic strips, describing those most relevant technical facts in the most artistic way. Given the large acceptance and interest received after each exhibition, we designed and developed a survey in order to collect feedback from the visitors. Our intention is to analyse to what extent the visitors, mainly Secondary grade students, have learnt about the importance and the decisive role of these female pioneers in Computer Science and, ultimately, promote a larger presence of students, especially female students, in Computer Science careers. In this paper we summarize the visitors first impressions about the poster exhibition, and we discuss a preliminary analysis of the received feedback.

Keywords:

Gender gap, STEM initiative, Computer Science, educational comics.