To begin: I am a woman teacher of introductory computer sciences. My two sections this semester have 150 students each. When I say there’s a “pretty good” gender balance, I mean it doesn’t take me too long to find women to make eye contact with while I’m lecturing. It’s definitely nowhere near 50-50, though.
I had a student come into my office hours on Monday and mention, in passing, how intimidating it was that whenever I’d ask a question there were a bunch of male hands that would immediately jump into the air. “The guys already know all this,” she told me. The thing is – they don’t. Most of the time their answers are incomplete or straight up wrong, but the hands are there. The hands always go up. Clearly they know.
I make an absolute point of calling on a woman if she raises her hand, because it’s important for other women – and men – to hear a female voice answering a question. But am I self-sabotaging? Are women afraid to raise their hands now because they know they’ll be called on? I don’t know. What I do know is that right now, the class is falling back into that depressing rut of “programming is for white and east Asian men”, and I feel like I’m already defeated.