Background and Context An ongoing thread in computing education research is how to increase women’s participation in computing. One potential way is to improve their sense of belonging, as sense of belonging has been shown to be related to persistence. Research from other STEM fields has shown that students benefit from sharing a gender identity with their professor. However, there is limited work on how a teaching assistant’s (TA) identity relates to students’ outcomes.

Objectives We studied how sharing a gender identity with their discussion TA relates to students’ performance, sense of belonging, and comfort level participating in required discussion sections. We investigated whether there were significant differences between male and female students for each of these outcomes and whether there were smaller differences when students share a gender identity with their TA.

Method Using data from two offerings of an upper-level algorithms course ($N=298$ students), we compared outcomes across groups of students that do versus do not share a gender identity with their discussion TA.

Findings In our context, we did not find significant evidence of a relationship between sharing gender identity and student outcomes.