GenderSurfer

Inspiration

After hearing a talk from Professor Londa Schiebinger about the gender issues that have arisen in tech and the web, we were inspired to try to introduce these sorts of social issues to an introductory CS audience.

What it does

GenderSurfer is a redux of NameSurfer, a common assignment given to intro CS students at Stanford. It looks at the prevalence of certain adjectives as used in review of professors from RateMyProfessor.com and the differences in these prevalences with respect to gender.

Challenges we ran into

It was really difficult to try to design a whole assignment in just a few hours. For a more complete version of this assignment that would be suitable to give students, it would also be difficult, though certainly possible, to collect enough data to make it interesting.

What's next for GenderSurfer

Hopefully we'll be able to flesh out our dataset much more, and clean up the requirements for the user interface.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all of the CS106A course staff who have contributed to developing the NameSurfer assignment over the past several years. Double thanks to Chris Piech, whose version of the assignment and of the assignment guidelines we based our own on. Triple thanks to Professor Ben Schmidt of Northeastern University, whose own applet about gendered language in professorial reviews gave us the inspiration (as well as our data)

Built With

• java