A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender Representation in Software Engineering Education Videos on YouTube

Abstract

Educational resources may frame students' perceptions of who belongs in software engineering, which is relevant given the field's ongoing gender gap. However, we know little about the hidden curriculum regarding gender in online learning spaces. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of 200 manually analysed English and German software engineering tutorials on YouTube, examining gender representation through contextual domains and linguistic identity markers. Our results show that male characters and masculine linguistic defaults dominate the tutorials. We identified an agency gap, in which technical and decision-making roles are almost exclusively assigned to male actors, while female actors are either absent or tend to passive, low-agency roles. The findings indicate that software engineering education on YouTube may reproduce gendered norms, in which linguistic and representational gatekeeping may serve as a symbolic barrier to software engineering.