Gender Disparities in a Databases Course: Performance of Different Activities

Underrepresentation of females in Computer Science (SC) courses, mostly in programming education, is a widely reported phenomenon and several studies have investigated gender differences in motivation and preferences. However, there are few studies about gender differences in different course activities and gender differences in database courses. “Databases” is one of the introductory courses at the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu, the purpose of which is to provide an overview of the tools for creating and handling relational databases, to get acquainted with the basics of the theory of relational databases, and to learn SQL query language. The goal of this paper is to examine gender differences in student attendance and performance in this database course. The data from the Moodle environment was obtained from 345 students who participated in this course in spring 2023. Among them, 115 (33.3%) were female and 230 (66.7%) male students. A Chi-square test was used to compare the proportion of male and female students, and nonparametric tests were used for comparing points and aggregated variables. The results indicate that there were few statistically significant differences between female and male students. However, while female students received significantly higher course total scores compared to males, there was no statistically significant difference in grades by gender.