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A revolution is under way in the teaching of computer science in schools in England - but it risks leaving girls and pupils from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities behind. That's the conclusion of academics who've studied data about the move from ICT as a national curriculum subject to computer science.
Four years ago, amid general disquiet that ICT was teaching children little more than how Microsoft Office worked, the government took the subject off the national curriculum. The idea was that instead schools should move to offering more rigorous courses in computer science - children would learn to code rather than how to do PowerPoint.
But academics at Roehampton University, who compile an annual study of computing education, have some worrying news. First, just 28% of schools entered pupils for the GCSE in computing in 2015. At A-level, only 24% entered pupils for the qualification.
Then there's the evidence that girls just aren't being persuaded to take an interest - 16% of GCSE computing entrants in 2015 were female and the figure for the A-level was just 8.5% . The qualification is relatively new and more schools - and more girls, took it in 2016 - but female participation was still only 20% for the GCSE and 10% for the A-level.
Why is it girls are not attracted to computer science? Is it some deeply embedded gender bias, or something else?
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday December 23 2016, @08:48AM
I am from planet earth and I look at data. Here is some data: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding [npr.org] That is the average - in reality there were plenty of places, specially academia, where women were in higher numbers. Now I don't agree with the conclusion of aforementioned article which blames everything to video game as per latest feminist hysteria, but there was NO discrimination against women in CS.
Too late to say any of that [cornell.edu]. The goal was always to bring unequal opportunity [nih.gov] in the name of equal outcome. As per WEF, the most gender equal countries are countries with more women than men [wikipedia.org] when in reality the normal unadulterated ratio is 950 women per 1000 men (0.95).
Then WEF says this:
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:11AM
Nice graph in the linked article, but it appears to agree with me, not with you. You said that half the coders were women before 1980. I said it peaked at more like 1/3 in the 1980s. According to the chart in your link, the peak was 37% in 1983/84.
As for the equal opportunity (rather than equal results): I actually do believe this will be coming back. The progressives have had their day, and the pendulum is swinging back. Just as an example, my university is holding a series of workshops on the topic of making CS more attractive. When the women (it's only women) running the workshops presented their interviews with existing students, it turned out that they had interviewed almost exclusively female students. I called them on this blatant discrimination, they apologized, and the workshop discussions did not thereafter focus on women. This would have played out differently as recently as 2-3 years ago.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:54AM
You are right about that graph.
But it doesn't matter if the pendulum swings back - that means we are not actually not making any progress. True progress is made when (sorry to continue using this awesome analogy) the fulcrum is moved. And for what its worth, the fulcrum/center was always about men giving away to women. Chivalry, the word, is not something progressives invented. They just demanded for it, and may be have pushed a tad too much. True equality is not chivalrous, and that is not going to happen.