The Proof of Gold is Fire: Measuring Stress to Show Impact of Gender Based Initiatives in Computing Education

Many initiatives across the world try to address the issue of gender imbalance in computing education. Evaluation of the impact of these initiatives is not always straightforward. Some interventions are able to demonstrate impact based on recruitment and retention numbers of underrepresented gender groups, in particular, women, often requiring a longer-term study to see impact. Others, especially shorter term interventions and those taking place during the teaching and learning process, frequently use feedback and other instruments as a measure of impact. This work reviews existing evaluation methods from the literature, categorises them as using statistical data, feedback or instruments, grouping different approaches into sub categories. It then looks at how the different types of initiatives map to the categories of evaluation practices, discusses trends, and makes a recommendation suitable for measuring the impact on shorter term than obtaining recruitment or retention statistics. The Perceived Stress Scale is proposed as a lightweight and time saving approach to evaluate some of the retention based gender initiatives.