Encouraging Women to Pursue a Computer Science Career in the Context of a Third World Country

This innovative practice full paper presents a set of engaging actions aimed to encourage women to pursue a Computer Science career in a city of a third world country (Manaus, Brazil). Despite worldwide efforts to promote gender equality, typically, women account for less than 30% of the workforce in technological areas. In third world countries, the situation is much more unbalanced. Poor educational and economic conditions, allied with a chauvinism culture contaminated by sexism and stereotypes, are strong forces that repel the young girls from IT areas. As a result, the percentage of women in local Computer Science majors is lower than expected. The authors detail a program to involve girls from all school levels in computer science career, which is indeed the adaptation of a national program, combined with indigenous elements. The mentioned adaptation was a key success factor to catch the attention of students and local educators. Some activities that are included in this program are lectures at scientific, technological and gender discussion events, realization of dynamics in schools for the dissemination of computational thinking in children and young students, training students to take part in programming contests and develop knowledge into real computational applications. These actions resulted in highlights achieved in programming contests and prizes obtained through application development, and have provided a more conducive academic environment to discuss issues related to the female gender in science and technology fields. Besides the fundamentals of the program, the authors present the results of the last three initiatives, which happened in conjunction with local events, and the promising opportunities perceived in Computer Science major of a local university.