Gender Disparities in Programming Competence in India

Is there a gender gap in programming skills among computing students in India, and if so, when does it show up? At ACM COMPUTE 2020, I presented a multi-institutional research initiative on this question, led by Chitra Babu, Viraj Kumar, and me. It is motivated by anecdotal reports of a gap at entry-level jobs. The plan is to track student performance in entry-level competitive programming contests (run with CodeChef, across many institutions) at the start, middle, and end of college, over two years. Planned outcomes include a quantitative analysis, recommendations like inclusive pedagogy, and a dataset for further research.