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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: 3, Insightful) by skullz on Saturday June 07 2014, @07:04PM
As far as tech and brain function is concerned there is no real difference between men and women. The studies that showed brain differences have not been able to be reproduced (the scientific gold standard) so we are left with man = woman = human. Men don't like coding more than women. Women don't like languages more than men. Woman are not better multitaskers than men. That's all bunk.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 08 2014, @12:24PM
If the studies couldn't find differences then the authors suck at designing studies. Maybe they should have got female researchers to design them.
That all humans share equal mental abilities on average regardless of genetic background, goes against everything we know about genetics.
A theory that preposterous requires demonstrating beyond a doubt that the opposite is false rather than relying on the absence of evidence against it.
If you want to believe that a Jew called Jesus, whose mother was impregnated by an all-powerful being, died, resurrected, and then went on to write a book containing all his best moments a few centuries after his death, you are free to do so, but I am going to need some pretty good evidence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 08 2014, @10:20PM
For the believer, no evidence is necessary. For the skeptic, no amount of evidence is sufficient.
-- 'Three Proofs: That God Exists' by Walt Runkis
http://booklocker.com/books/3881.html [booklocker.com] (Paywall to full eBook)
http://assets.booklocker.com/pdfs/3881s.pdf [booklocker.com] (Excerpt -- ELECTRIFYING!!!)