Gender Bias in Remote Pair Programming among Software Engineering Students: The twincode Exploratory Study

Context. Pair programming (PP) has been found to increase student interest in Computer Science, particularly so for women, and would therefore appear to be a way to help remedy their under-representation, which could be partially motivated by gender stereotypes applied to software engineers, assuming that men perform better than their women peers. If this same bias is present in pair programming, it could work against the goal of improving gender balance. Objective. In a remote setting in which students cannot directly observe their peers, we aim to explore whether they behave differently when the perceived gender of their remote PP partners changes, searching for differences in (i) the perceived productivity compared to solo programming; (ii) the partner's perceived technical competency compared to their own; (iii) the partner's perceived skill level; (iv) the interaction behavior, such as the frequency of source code additions, deletions, etc.; and (v) the type and relative frequencies of dialog messages in a chat window. Method. Using the twincode platform, several behaviors are automatically measured during the remote PP process, together with two questionnaires and a semantic tagging of the pairs' chats. A series of experiments to identify the effect, if any, of possible gender bias shall be performed. The control group will have no information about their partner's gender, whereas the treatment group will receive such information but will be selectively deceived about their partner's gender. For each response variable we will (i) compare control and experimental groups for the score distance between two in-pair tasks; then, using the data from the experimental group only, we will (ii) compare scores using the partner's perceived gender as a within-subjects variable; and (iii) analyze the interaction between the partner's perceived gender and the subject's gender.