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A huge nationwide push is underway, funded by the nonprofit Code.org's corporate and billionaire donors, from Amazon and Google to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, to introduce American schoolchildren to coding and to redefine it as a basic skill to be learned alongside the three R's.
Code.org's curriculum has been adopted by 20,000 teachers from kindergarten to 12th grade. But if coding is the new lingua franca, literacy rates for girls are dropping: Last year, girls made up 18.5 percent of A.P. computer science test-takers nationwide, a slight decrease from the year before. In three states, no girls took the test at all. An abysmal 0.4 percent of girls entering college intend to major in computer science [PDF]. And in 2013, women made up 14 percent of all computer science graduates down from 36 percent in 1984. The imbalance persists in the tech industry. Just this week, Google released data showing that women account for just 17 percent of its tech employees.
The problem is not only getting girls to computer class, but keeping them there.
See also girlswhocode.com.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07 2014, @06:42PM
We could lock girls in the basement and tell them to learn to code Fizz Buzz in one hour or be put in an old freezer with flesh-eating cockroaches. They'd learn really, really fast!
But why not treat females as rational actors capable of making their own choices about what they're interested in?
I don't have much firsthand experience, but I think females aren't stupid and can figure out there's no future in coding in the first place. (At least those smart enough to learn coding to begin with.) Who would get into a field that's purging workers as fast as the technology industry? You'd have to basically have no other career prospects and live a sad, pathetic life to put up with the abuse and pain of developing software for a living with no hope of a career or even personal dignity. (I do have firsthand experience with that.)
Besides, I can't think of one single interest I have which someone else forced me into or coerced me into doing. Usually that's the stuff I never want to touch again. Usually, when people have an avocation for something, you can't get them to stop doing it.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday June 10 2014, @12:00AM
My mother was told by her father that she wasn't allowed to go to college, because that wasn't something women were supposed to do. That would have been in the late 70s or early 80s.
The generation currently entering the workforce may very well be the first that hasn't had many explicit sexist regulations about what careers and education they could or could not have. There's still plenty of implicit and explicit messaging along those lines, if for no other reason than inertia. We've never really had an opportunity to study if there are gender differences in career choice beyond what is pushed by existing social norms. The difference is there, but we have no idea why. Hormones? Brain structure? Societal pressure? Physical attributes? Seems like something worth studying to me.
But yes, even though there's never before been an opportunity to do a rigorous scientific study on this, even though the entire concept is pretty damn novel in the course of human history, you've apparently gotten it all figured out in only five minutes. Guess you just must be the next goddamn Einstein!