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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 Sunday June 08 2014, @05:33AM
> Actually there was a study done that found that men process spatial acuity better than women do.
And there was also a study [economist.com] that found it had nothing to do with the "hormonal bath" and everything to do with experience. That's the way these things always turn out, naive and poorly designed experiments confirm stereotypes, more thoughtful analysis shows otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 09 2014, @04:10AM
In your opinion. FTFY.