Addressing the "Leaky Pipeline": A Review and Categorisation of Actions to Recruit and Retain Women in Computing Education ...

Gender imbalance in computing education is a well-known issue around the world. The term "leaky pipeline" is often used to describe the lack of retention of women before they progress to senior roles. Numerous initiatives have targeted the problem of the leaky pipeline in recent decades. This paper provides a comprehensive review of initiatives related to techniques used to boost recruitment and retention of women in undergraduate computing and related courses in higher education. The primary aim was to identify interventions or initiatives (which we called "actions") that have shown some effectiveness. A secondary objective was to structure our findings as a categorisation, in order to enable future action discussion, comparison and planning. A particular challenge faced in a significant portion of the work was the lack of evaluation: i.e. the assessment of the direct relationship between the initiatives and the outcomes on retention or recruitment. The actions were categorised into four groups: Policy, ... : 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table ...