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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 07 2014, @08:14PM
Start building community by accepting community involvement.
Open source projects in particular are maintained by total pricks who reject contributions for arbitrary and spiteful reasons. This comic about sums up the state of "the community" on GitHub:
http://rachelnabors.com/2012/04/of-github-and-pull-requests-and-comics/ [rachelnabors.com]
tldr: if (not_invented_here) GTFO();
How about being more "social" about "social coding" instead of just waving your coder dicks around, bros.
(Score: 2) by skullz on Saturday June 07 2014, @08:59PM
I'm an introvert, you insensitive clod!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 08 2014, @12:36PM
None of that has anything to do with male/female although the comic author certainly pushed it into the situation.
The problem is your code is your child. You're proud when it doesn't F up (too much) and when it grows up and does stuff in the real world thats pretty awesome, but you're also the one person in the entire world up at 2am when its puking all over the place and everyone looks at you kinda funny if (when) it crashes and burns. For better or worse its yours for rest of your life. Not the worlds, not some volunteers... its your code.
And suddenly one random day a stranger shows up and hands you a free puppy, of course you'll love it, who wouldn't want a gift of puppy? Well, um, ah, err, well thanks for the puppy, and sorry to disappoint you but little did you know, I just got new carpet put in the house, and one of my friends is actually allergic to dog fur and honestly I like him more than I like some random stranger, and that's a really nice pit bull puppy but when I daydream about puppies its always shelties and collies and hounds. And puppies are not cheap and my household budget which you know nothing about does not have space for a puppy right now. And the family was talking about how much fun it would be in the distant future for US to pick out a new puppy together as a family bonding activity, not daydreaming about a random puppy being selected and catapulted by someone else into our house as a surprise. Someone walks up to me with a puppy and tries to hand me the leash, I'm nice enough not going to shoot them on sight as a standing order, but you can understand why sometimes the recipient doesn't exactly jump up and down with joy.
Then the stranger who was trying to give away a free puppy goes away all butthurt and draws a drowning in angst comic about the situation and then tries to twist sexism into the story such that they're sure if a "brogrammer" tried to give me a free puppy I'd surely accept and give him a nice bro-hug and we'd each smash beer cans against our foreheads and slap each other's butts just like "manly" pro football players, but I wouldn't accept her free puppy solely because shes a GamerGirl and likes pink and Hello Kitty. Because, yeah, thats the only possible reason, yeah.
There are much funnier dating analogies which I can't be bothered to relate in equal detail but it all revolves around comparing github to a dating website, and swaps the genders such that its illogical that women wouldn't want an infinite supply of free dick pixs from random guys so any women that doesn't reciprocate interest back to every random guy who sends her a picture of mr happy is obviously doin it wrong.