Personal Context/Persistence and Identity: Individual Participant’s Pathways

We found that the learners seeking out resources to teach themselves to code were generally college educated women who were motived either by the desire to be able to read and understand the code written by hired developers or the desire to become developers themselves. The importance of a female-focused learning setting was mixed; while most women acknowledged a more comfortable atmosphere created by such a setting, very few cited that as a primary reason for joining the group.

All learner participants in this study persisted through the ten weeks of the Women’s Coaching and Learning course, and reasons for learning stayed consistent. Participation beyond the course, however, varied, with most women discovering that they did not have the time or the motivation to continue to learn to code on their own with work and family obligations and without real-world, properly-sized problems for them to complete as they continued their learning. Many participants had taken on the identity of a “coder” through their participation in the Women’s Coaching and Learning Group, although a couple of the women qualified this by such terms as a “coder on hold.” Two of the nine learners that participated in this study successfully obtained Apex developer jobs after their participation and some continued learning and Salesforce certification.

The personal contexts of the learners and individual learner outcomes are illustrated in the document linked to below.