Nextjournal / Jun 06 2019
by David Schmudde

Women Programmers - Chicas en Tecnología

Objective

A collaboration with the core Nextjournal team to publish research regarding gender diversity in Argentine computer science as an explorable, data driven, reproducible article.

Problem Statement

In Argentina we didn't have any data about how many women vs men chose to study Computer Science and how this number changes through the years.

Researchers, journalists, and the general population need to explore data to draw their own conclusions on the cause and solutions to the Argentine technology gender gap.

Input

The Chicas en Tecnología dataset and other public datasets.

The Chicas en Tecnología dataset is the first dataset of all Universities and Institutes in Argentina and the number of women and men who are enroll as students, who graduate, and the number of inscriptions in Tech related careers.

  • 73 career titles
  • 81 universities and institutes
  • More than 8 years of info

In Argentina we have a public data portal with 816 datasets [including]:

  • Sociodemographic information
  • Public vs private institution and gender
  • Geographic data
  • Public policies applied by year

Output

Interactive data visualizations and maps that are the result of a cross-domain analysis.

Existing Assets

Women Programmers - Chicas en Tecnología currently includes these assets:

These existing assets and research will form the foundation of an interactive article. Our goal is to change how people engage research. To paraphrase Bret Victor, rather than "information to be consumed," the resulting notebook will be "used as an environment to think in."

This will be accomplished using Nextjournal's existing technologies and collaborative efforts with the Nextjournal team where appropriate, e.g. specialty graphics, user experience components, or back end services.

Deliverables

The project should roughly take 2 months to implement and begins upon receipt of the first paid installment of the award. This includes:

  • An interactive cross-domain analysis of three career tracks (law, medicine, and computer science, for example) and socioeconomic status that illustrates gender participation over time.
  • A map that shows the distribution of universities across Argentina and their levels of gender disparity. The intention is to reveal differences in approach and strategy based on geographic differences.
  • Exploratory graphs

The work will primarily take place in Python.

Administration

  • $1,500 will be awarded upon receiving the initial invoice from the awardee.

  • $1,500 upon receiving the second invoice from the awardee at the completion of the project.

  • The awardee is responsible for bank transfer and currency exchange fees.

  • All individuals in the project's group will be provided a Private Research plan and receive all related benefits plus unlimited cloud compute resources.

Team

A collaboration between Nextjournal and the chicasentecnologia group:

  • Carolina Luz Hadad, Chicas en Tecnología co-founder
  • Melina Masnatta, Chicas en Tecnología co-founder, researcher

Other team members and programmers to be determined, including:

  • A journalist specialized in data
  • A data visualization expert
  • A programmer specialized in data analytics

Glossary

  • Awardee - the winning individual or team of Nextjournal's Scholarship for Explorable Research.

  • Article: a published, version controlled document that includes data, code, commentary, and execution environment.

  • Notebook - a published or unpublished human-readable document that combines code, commentary, and results.

  • Reproducibility - the ability to generate the same results at some point in the future given the same data and code.

  • Remix - an exact copy of a published Nextjournal article. With remixing, it is easy to take fully accredited work, reproduce its results, and experiment with variants.

  • Explorable explanations is a term that is best illustrated in Bret Victor’s essays Ten Brighter Ideas and Explorable Explanations.