Empowering Girls in Computer Science

Empowering Girls in Computer Science

"That's just for boys!" is a common remark heard among young girls. In fact, my younger sister recently made that comment to me when I asked her if she played a certain videogame. While the context might be innocent or inane, it's alarming how many things are deemed to be "for boys" when, in reality, this couldn't be farther from the truth.

Science- and technology-related fields of study and employment are often treated this way, even though women have historically been at the forefront of groundbreaking scientific and technological advancements. From Ada Lovelace to Katherine Johnson, knowledge of prominent female figures in STEM careers are difficult to come by, although recently more and more stores about these women have surfaced in mainstream media. It is easy to see how young girls internalize the "boys only" misconception when so many of the facts circulated in science and technology appear to be dominated by men.

Women code too

Ada Lovelace was a talented mathematician born in 1815. Ada took to mathematics at an early age, and was able to study math at the collegiate level. While translating an article about an invention created by her mentor, Ada was able to share some of her own ideas about the machine, along with notes on how computer code could be written to give the device repeatable instructions. Because of this, she is considered by many to be the world's first computer programmer.

The story of Katherine Johnson was recently featured in the Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures. Katherine was an incredibly gifted woman. At the age of 10, she was a freshman in high school. She started working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, later known as NASA, in 1952. Her job title? Computer. Young women were hired at the time to perform calculations, even when NASA began to use actual computers for these tasks. Katherine's mathematical skills were so virtuosic that her job was to double-check the work of the machines! In 2015, Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Female influences in computer science are not relegated only to historical contributions. Over the past few years Samaira Mehta has been featured in the news and invited to speak at conferences for her work as a programmer — a title she earned at 6 years old! Her work has helped children all across the country learn to code.

Getting girls into computer science

While there is still a considerable amount of progress to be made, there are signs that more girls are getting exposed to computer science earlier on in their K-12 education. In 2018, there was a 39% increase in the number of female students who took the Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science exam. Taken by high school students, passing scores on AP exams can translate to credit at many American colleges.

Still, in 2015, only 18% graduates with a computer science degree were female. Why is this?

• Lack of female role models. As we mentioned earlier, the computer scientists and other workers in STEM fields we see at tech companies in Silicon Valley in the news and on TV are usually men. We don't see as many women in technology, and thus software engineering doesn't doesn't get added as often to girls' lists of career aspirations.

• Lack of early exposure. Studies show that students are ten times more likely to major in computer science if they are introduced to it early on to build their programming experience, like in an AP Computer Science class.

• Misconceptions about programming as a career.The media also portrays programming as an independent and "nerdy" discipline, whereas building software is actually a very collaborative process.

• Afraid to make mistakes. Code rarely runs perfectly the first time you run it, and learning how to debug code is a key programming skill.

How coding schools help

It's hard to aspire toward what you've never glimpsed. Seeing women in STEM roles is key to discouraging the "that's for boys" mentality that has girls self-selecting out of fields they could succeed in. Mentorship is a great way to encourage young girls to experiment with technology.

How do coding schools help encourage girls in STEM?

• Exposure to a female role model. Girls have a mentor to work with who is passionate about computer science and demonstrates highly technical skills.

• Early exposure to computer programming. Students can start as young as 8, and we offer beginner courses in Scratch and Python.

• Easy to make mistakes. Our instructors dispel the notion that code has to be perfect before we run it. We emphasize the importance of incrementally testing our code and how to debug code that isn't working.

• Easy to ask questions. Some girls may be nervous to ask questions in a larger computer science course with more students. In a private class, there is no judgement!

This article originally appeared on junilearning.com

Girls In Tech

When I first moved to Austin in 2003, I was looking for organizations to volunteer with and chose GirlStart. I supported after-school robotics for girls in a local middle school and wonder what those kids are studying now, whether STEM or another field. While I think the pipeline problem is important and needs to be addressed, I think an equally significant and perhaps bigger problem is post-graduation, with retention of women in technical fields.

This weekend I volunteered at Chicktech High School to support high school girls in an IoT workshop, building and coding a Micro:bit watch. The workshop teacher worked at Microsoft philanthropy training computer science teachers. It was very exciting to meet the ChickTech leadership team and fellow volunteers and mentors. All the women had their own stories of how they were introduced to computer science or resisted it because it was their parents' choice of discipline for them. I met the woman who brought ChickTech to Austin four years ago and really enjoyed her story. I also met teachers, software developers, and technical writers. We talked about how more women are needed in development and sales engineering, and how women tend to be in customer success or professional services such as training or consulting. While their presence and voice adds badly needed diversity to tech leadership, we still need women in the more technical domains . Women need to be recognized and respected for their abilities to design algorithms and write code, otherwise coding is still mainly for men.

I think what contributes to the lack of women in development is the lack of women in development. We don't see people that look like us on software engineering teams, so it is easy to feel isolated and lonely if you are female. It also takes a certain personality to have longevity as a developer, rather than branching out to other areas of a software company that are customer-facing. Unfortunately, because developers are mostly men, their leadership is men as well, which makes it hard for women to feel like they belong and feel like they have a voice.

For this reason, I applaud organizations like Women Who Code whose purpose is to create community among female coders. However, the challenges are great, as female developers will not see many fellow women on their development team or at development conferences. I think there needs to be more support at the corporate level and more leadership training and mentoring for women. The organizations supporting and growing the pipeline of girls and keeping them in computer science are doing a great job, and now the professional community must unite to recognize the challenge that female software engineers and sales engineers face and help them navigate and succeed in their male-dominated teams.