Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

3-2022

Abstract

Collaboration is important during software development, but related work has found gender differences can influence the collaboration process, creating inequality in the team’s dynamics. In this paper, we present a gender analysis study that involved 39 students, examining their teams’ online collaborations while contributing to a large open-source software project. Eight teams of 4-6 Software Engineering (SE) students communicated over an online messaging platform, Slack, to complete an eight-week project. The goal of this study is to identify gender differences emerging from team collaboration. A mixed-methods approach was used to collect students’ teamwork experiences and analyse their collaboration. Our research shows statistically significant results in female students’ leadership, coordination, and project-monitoring behaviours used to complete the project. The results also showed a higher rate of help seeking within the all-female team, an infrequent behaviour observed in the all-male and mixed-gender teams. Our findings raise future research opportunities to further investigate the gender differences emerging from team collaboration.

Keywords

collaboration, gender analysis, teamwork

Discipline

Educational Methods | Instructional Media Design | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Providence, RI, USA, March 3-5

Volume

1

First Page

432

Last Page

438

ISBN

9781450390705

Identifier

10.1145/3478431.3499279

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3478431.3499279

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