How to attract girls to the tech industry

When the article tries to deal with Lovelace:

> Ada Lovelace was coding in a time when few men did

Really? Even such an obtuse statement indicates a complete ignorance of what she did weakening further any point they have to make. Not helped by the fact they have not indicated the IT interests and acomplishments of the girl whom is the subject of the article. Some of the worst (Male) employees we have ever hired as developers had either 1st class BEng or even PhD level qualifications. Degree programs in IT in the UK are approaching worthless for the most part.

This article is infuriating, a complete abomination and demonstrative of everything which is wrong with the approach to girls in technology. The topic is now approaching a level of dullness that makes me wonder if anything will ever change.

Issues with the articles assume external factors actively opressing the abilities of girls. Abilities cannot be suppressed. They can only fail to exploit them in the light of other social roadblocks. There is no indication of any understanding in the article as to why girls don't pursue jobs in STEM. There is an inferrence that a patriarchy is responsible and is actively seeking their exclusion. Applications of statistics in this area fail to illuminate but at all any useful causal link. The reason being polical correctness refuses people\ who might be willing to propose logical reasons for the gap an audience due to the refusal to listen to what is perceived as mysogeny.

How many women are there in other industries who have to, on a daily basis, do highly competative problem solving. There are plenty in Science and Humanities PhD positions. How does that differ from seeking actively problem solving roles in IT?

I'm so fed up with the whole thing.

> Mrs Lovelace was coding in an age when even few men were

It's even better than that. Ada was coding before there were COMPUTERS.

Also see Bret Victor's rant on creating the future: "In 1968 — three years before the invention of the microprocessor — Alan Kay stumbled across Don Bitzer's early flat-panel display. Its resolution was 16 pixels by 16 pixels — an impressive improvement over their earlier 4 pixel by 4 pixel display. Alan saw those 256 glowing orange squares, and he went home, and he picked up a pen, and he drew a picture of a goddamn iPad." http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

I'm a woman and a programmer. I don't know why they aren't more female programmers. Going through school up through high school, I always had the impression that of my fellow classmates, the girls were the best in class. Pre-calculus was the highest math course my dinky high school offered, and there were a couple girls in there with me out of maybe eight students total. It was only when I came to college that I started seeing way more men in my CS and math classes, and lost the impression that guys were just apathetic about school. The only girls in my classes were Indian or Asian, and there weren't many of them. One other white girl I knew told me she went into CS because she thought that was the right field for becoming a secretary. I've never had problems with guys harassing me because of my interests or jobs, for which I suppose I'm fortunate. I wish I knew why there were so few women in my college CS classes, and why I rarely meet other female programmers in my town now.

The title is actually Why tech needs a makeover to attract girls but the article doesn't say why. Technology is at the forefront of the economy and women have a vital role to play feels rather empty.

And while I'm sure Brazil and India can offer insights and be on the forefront of improving policies, those are not really very enticing models to emulate. Let's be honest, women in India work in IT to get ahead because India is poor.

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

Hipsters are living the dream. Most people don't want to slave away at the keyboard.

Obligatory Kate Beaton comics: http://www.harkavagrant.com/history/lovelacesm.png

Lets attract girls to construction and building jobs, and attract men to nursing and child care jobs as well. What can we do about that?

These issues go hand in hand, they are the same.

In my opinion it is bad taste to focus only on the tech industry. Go all in or go home.

Step 1: stop referring to adult women as "girls"

The article has the answer of why women aren't in tech fields:

Choosing computer science is an unnecessarily tough choice and one you aren't going to make unless you are one of the stubborn girls like I was

Women in western countries have a lot of life choices that don't include working at an office job. The article talks about IT tracks conflicting with drama tracks... I was thinking "wtf?". If you have drama as one of the main reason for going to school, then you're not really worried about having to earn a living some day. Must be nice.

For men, getting a career to earn a living is what's beaten into you from a very young age. I chose IT as a study and a career because it intersected with the sets of "things that can earn me a decent living" and "things that interest me".

The article goes on to say that the solution is to do more advocacy to encourage women to get into STEM; but that does nothing to really address the root cause... as though it could or should.

The only thing an industry can do to become more attractive is to increase the wages. I hardly doubt a "makeover" or a pink keyboard will make the work more attractive. Also, the insinuation that people some how "must be lured" or even "can be lured" is rather ridiculous.

I must get too much spam. I first read this as "in", instead of "to". Darned priming.

Incredible, that article seems to get by without blaming men at all. Did I miss something?

In another note, the whole A-levels system seems rather stupid to me. I've met several people in the UK who weren't able to study what they want because they had the wrong A-levels.

I guess ultimately it is questionable in general to deny people the possibility to study what they want. Why require some silly school certificate?

This stuff infuriates me.

> But then last year I spoke at a conference and I heard that the numbers of women in technology was in decline and I thought, 'That isn't right.'

It is not right nor wrong! It just is. To make a statement like this is to give legitimacy to the idea that the equipment you've got tucked between your thighs is in some way relevant to your ability to do the job. Who cares? Just do the damn job and if you encounter some closed-minded fool who thinks your sex lessens you, then beat them down with logic.

Trying to kludge the world into fitting your own little vision of how it should be is a recipe for misery.

> Technology is at the forefront of the economy and women have a vital role to play. When my daughters are born I don't want them to feel like the odd ones out.

Then teach them how to thrive in the face of adversity. God knows they'll find it useful.

Can't understand if she is employed as a "coder" or opted for a PR/charity path.

I'll propose a theory which will probably not be very popular, that IT jobs are one of the few "male" support jobs that are marginally socially acceptable, causing intense demand for them by men and crowding out the women who have other opportunities.

If a woman wants a low status / long hours / behind the scenes / support career there are a variety of socially acceptable job fields to enter. Secretary, nurse, day care worker, elementary school teacher, social worker... If a guy wants a similar job there is what, a small amount of jobs ending in -tech like large diesel engine tech aka mechanic, which are rapidly technologizing anyway into "IT plus some grease" and of course IT. And thats about it. So the girls can do anything including IT, but all the guys are stuck in IT.

I would theorize that if you made male nurses, male day care workers, male social workers more socially acceptable, the logjam of male IT workers would decline and you'd approach 50:50 both inside and outside IT.

If every frustrated male nurse / male secretary / male schoolteacher crowds into the IT classes, its going to overwhelm the small number of female exclusively IT students.

I may be off on the root causes but I think I'm onto something with the mechanism of male concentration. Maybe the root cause is a desire to enter an extremely agism oriented field, or a desire for the drama of always being on call and only being visible during disasters sort of a policeman/fireman job for nonathletic people.

Maybe rephrased the general wider class of humans that might like IT or a related field, is sorted by sex such that all the guys get stuck in IT but the women are free to choose, so "naturally" the concentration of maleness in IT is very high in IT and low in other related fields.

Women are doing pretty well in management, there are a few women in IT and it's because they like not because they are there for the career progression. Women have a better success rate than other industry.

We need an article on how to attract girls if you work in the tech industry... I suspect thats always the real problem here.

Everyone should quit being so sexist. Women are allowed to be different :/

WOW, this article is bullshit after bullshit.

For example, Ada Lovelace coding in a time when few mem did... That is obvious, she was the first programmer, by definition she did before anyone else (male or female).

Or saying that Brazil has lots of female programmers and people assume that women in suits are in IT... That one is beyond wrong.

If you see a woman in suit (common where I live, that is São Paulo), their most likely job (beside being a secretary) is being a lawyer (we have a obscene amount of lawyers anyway).

Every day I cross by lots of female lawyers, had lawyer GFs, have lots of lawyer female friends...

Now the average woman dislike IT, not because it is a thing of men, when I am talking about IT wit ha friend for example and a women is bothered by it (happened a couple times), or impressed by it (also happened a couple times), what they say to me is that IT deals with machines and that is too complicated. (when I was younger I tried to teach them and whatnot, and I became sad when they just said it was complicated and refused to learn, now I see is that they don't want to bother).

I DID met some women working at IT, including had female co-workers... One interesting thing on them was that most were doing it for the money, because IT is well paid, women that suck at lawyering or other humananities end joining IT instead. I've met one women in IT that was in IT because she truly wanted to, her husband was a engineer, and she decided to have the same career as him, and work in IT as a hobby (she was very clear to our boss, that if work got in the way of taking care of her children she would quit because her husband money was enough... this was when the boss started to demand excessive overtime after badly created schedules)

Also by the way, when someone DO act sexist, is usually, women against women.

I have a degree in Game Design, on my campus there was also a course in Fashion Business (and several other design courses, and architecture).

My class had zero females. The other class in my year had one, that quickly became infamous (because she openly exchanged sex for people doing homework for her, specially with dumb guys, then she PROMISED sex, had the guy do the homework, and then dumped him)

Yet, several women became friends with us, and thought of moving to our course (some actually did), and people that joined after my year also had a bunch of women (I think the record was 25%)

Those women (that were officially in our course, or were friends and hanged out with us) were frequently attacked by women in other courses.

Most common attacks: "You are fat and ugly and want to hang out with nerds and otakus to have sex" (this was the most common, easily) "You are ugly and this is why you cannot work with fashion" (this came from fashion business students) "You are not a woman, you want to be a boy" "You are poor, not good enough for us" (Fashion Design students usually drove to university with Audi, Mercedes, etc... that in Brazil are crazy expensive, reaching in the six figures easily, Game Design students usually went walking or using bus, and most struggled to pay the tuition, sometimes you would recognize a fashion student on the bus stop, and frequently their reaction was to get instantly deep red and hide behind other people...)

After university, I kept seeing this same sort of behavior. (ie: other women attack IT women for not being lawyer, or medic, or PR...) although not as much as they attack full-time mothers (or those that state they want to drop their careers to become full-time mothers).

Role models: I heard the uk office of national stats has numbers that show a working solution, I.e. role models going to schools and talking pupils. but no one will fund it at scale.

Why do we have to "attract" them?

> "Some schools, often girl-only schools, simply don't offer ICT [information and communications technology] at A-level and the girls wanting to do it have to go to a nearby boys school to learn it," she says.

For what it's worth, I went to a public magnet school for computers, AND a private school in which every person had a laptop. I learned nothing of tech in either school, and I taught myself everything I know. (They wouldn't let me take the classes I was already studying at home)

> And among girls who carry on and study science at university, two out of three don't go on to Stem-related careers.

How many people actually get a career in what they got a degree? Probably half of the people I know do something different than what they studied in school.

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This kind of article has me thinking more and more about assigned gender roles and societal expectations. A lot of people are really concerned with getting women into the tech industry. Years ago, people were probably really concerned with getting women into etiquette school, or getting them to learn a trade such as seamstress. How is our modern imposition of what a particular gender should do any different than the old impositions?

People claim to be pushing for these "new" gender roles as a way to fight inequality, or because women need help getting into the industry. But how necessary is it? For nerdy/geeky people who are really inspired and curious about the stuff, there is little stopping someone from learning online via tutorials and books geared towards beginners.

That said, I think there is an urgent need for more female-centric online help. The male-dominated chat, mailing lists and forums can be horrible for anyone to browse, though they're particularly hostile towards women. But I don't think this is an industry thing, I think this is a general cultural thing. Find American boys or men anonymously online and they'll probably be doing some really horrible shit, a lot of it directed negatively towards women.

I think we all want a quick and easy fix, so we look at just the tech industry. We decide that we only want to fix our own little corner of the world and ignore the larger problem. But realistically, the lack of women in tech is probably a larger societal issue, and it won't ever be resolved until you address the bigger picture.

I just show them my ripped coding muscles.

Yeah baby, you like that don'cha.