  The COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered how post-secondary students
receive their education. Namely, the transition from an in-person to an online
class format changed how students interact with their instructors and their
classmates. In this paper, we use student participation scores from two core
computer science classes across ten in-person and three online quarters at a
public research university to analyze whether the shift to primarily
asynchronous online learning has impacted the gender gap in student
participation scores and students' attitudes towards themselves and their
peers. We observe a shift on the online class forum: in in-person classes,
males score higher on average and dominate the top scores while in online
classes, male and female students participate at approximately the same rate
classwide. To understand what might be driving changes in participation
behavior, we analyze survey responses from over a quarter of the students
enrolled in the online classes. While we find that students of both genders
tend to compare themselves to their peers less when classes are online, we also
find that this trend is much more accentuated for females than males. This data
suggests that observed female participation habits in typical in-person classes
are not inherent gender differences, but rather, a product of the environment.
Therefore, it is critical the community investigates the root causes of these
behavioral differences, and experiments with ways to mitigate them, before we
soon return to an in-person format.
