Attrition of women students in the first year of informatics studies at UTFSM Women are a minority among STEM undergraduate programs in Chile. Less than 20% of the students enrolled in technologyrelated careers are women, according to the Chilean Higher Education Information Services. The absence of genderrelated data on attrition rates among students of these programs in Chile is the main motivation of this work. We conducted a descriptive study of attrition in the Informatics undergraduate program at the UTFSM, a STEMfocused university in Chile. On average, 10% of the new students of the program are female. In the last five years, our program has had a mean attrition rate of 24% during the first year, while 30% of our female students drop out. Their score in the admission test explains to a greater extent both their academic performance in the undergraduate program and their decision to stayleave, but not completely. Many of the female students with high performance in the mathematics admission test drop out of their studies in the first year. The reasons for their departure remain unclear.

An exploration of STEM freshmens attitudes, engagement and autonomous learning in introductory computer programming Programming skills and computational thinking are fundamental concerns in professional training in Science, Technologyxe2x80x99 Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In spite of this, in the Chilean higher education system, as in most parts of the world, teaching programming is a challenging endeavor, partly because the majority of freshmen students in STEM undergraduate programs have not been introduced to the fundamentals of the discipline and its applications in K12 education. Therefore, studentsu0027 attitudes, engagement, and autonomous learning can make a difference in how students in STEM disciplines in higher education face their first programming course. In the present study, we carried out measurement of variables associated to these constructs involving a sample of 1694 freshmen of seventeen STEM programs in a Chilean research university. Relevant differences were found among different STEM programs, and by student gender. Implications of the results obtained and future research avenues are discussed.