The Brazilian School Girls' Perspectives on a Computer Science Major

The field of Computer Science has been of little interest for girls straight out of high school, when considering undergraduate majors in Brazil. At the University of Bras ??lia’s Department of Computer Science, female students compose less than 10% of the student body. In an effort to understand the girls’ lack of interest in computer related courses, we applied an anonymous questionnaire, from 2011 to 2014, regarding their perceptions of the field. The participants were 3707 females students who completed an anonymous questionnaire. We applied Association Rules in Data Mining and Principal Component Analysis to analyze these responses . The knowledge gained through this study could guide future research on the matter and guidelines for motivating girls to pursue careers in Computer Science.