Visualizations by Rachel Kinkley // Article by Marina Wooden
“With confidence, you have won before you have started.”
Activist, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur and orator Marcus Garvey spoke to the importance of confidence in the work we do. In our Informatics Student poll, we wanted to dive deeper into this idea – what external factors correlate with confidence? What might explain this gap?
Gender Identity and Confidence
Something that strongly influences confidence in programming skills, according to our research, is gender identity. Our research showed that in a poll in which 50% of respondents identified as male, 45% identified as female and 5% identified as non-binary, the median confidence level on a scale of 1-10 in men was 1 point higher than women.
This is important to consider, because while women make up about 47% of the workforce, they make up only about 25% of tech and computer science related jobs. As the tech industry continues to grow, it’s important to consider what might be driving women away and discouraging them from pursuing these jobs.
People who identified as non-binary had the highest confidence, with a median confidence level of 6.5, but their response rate was much lower, and so it is likely not representative of the demographic as a whole.
Programming Knowledge and Confidence
Unsurprisingly, a strong trend is observed in confidence and knowing more programming languages. Again, on a scale of 1-10 students were asked to rate their confidence in their programming skills, and the results were distributed by how many programming languages they knew. The upwards trend spiked especially between knowing three and four languages, the median confidence level rising 2.5 points! Overall, between knowing no programming languages, and knowing 8, the median confidence level rose 7.25 points.
This upwards trend is foreseeable, but less obvious are the implications of what is desirable in the real world. It’s possible that people who know more programming languages are more adaptable. Maybe, they are used to teaching themselves and learning new things, proving that they are more flexible and know how to expand their prior knowledge to solve unprecedented problems.
Graduation Year and Confidence
Intuitively, the longer a student spends studying something, the more confident they should feel in their abilities. However, our study showed no correlation between graduation year and confidence in programming ability. The median confidence score – 6 – was uniform across all classes from 2021 to 2024. However, when examining these results, it’s also important to note that the response rate for the class of 2021 was much higher than all other classes, and so these numbers may not be representative.
