This week marked 125 years since the 1893 election, when women voted for the first time in the world. Closer to home, there were celebrations in Waimate to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Margaret Cruickshank, NZ’s first female doctor. It’s amazing to think about how few opportunities women had 200 years ago and how quickly things have changed.
This week I also received a newsletter from NZTechWomen, linking to a report on diversity in tech by MYOB. This was mostly based on data from the 2013 census, which found that only 23% of tech workers in NZ are women. I’m quite surprised that it’s actually that high, as female developers seem to be the real tech unicorns.
The most interesting statistic to me? Just 3% of 15-year-old girls are considering a career in ICT.
Here’s a few quotes from the report:
- “Zoe [Timbrell, OMGTech!] believes peer pressure and cultural norms dissuade girls from studying technology – which they often perceive as ‘boy-ish’, boring and nerdy.”
- “Parents need to let their daughters experiment with technology. I have heard so many parents say ‘Oh, she wouldn’t be interested in that, but her brother would probably like it!'” – Alice Gatland, Girl Code
- “The fact that just three per cent of fifteen year-old girls want to pursue a career in technology shows us that we need to be targeting girls at a younger age. We have to be teaching computer science, engineering, problem-solving and computational thinking from primary school.” – Mahsa Mohaghegh, She Sharp
It Starts with Toys
… and movies and TV shows, and magazines, and sports, and the many, many other things that send a message to young girls that they are supposed to be Pretty and Sweet and Take Care of People, while boys are supposed to be Tough and Strong and Good at Fixing Things. But let’s focus on toys.
I am lucky that I was raised by hippies who did their best to shield me from this stuff. I had no idea that girls weren’t supposed to be interested in clothing and dolls rather than dinosaurs and Lego. I’m also lucky that I was immobile for a large chunk of my toddlerhood due to an injury, which meant I spent a lot of time playing with jigsaw puzzles while the other kids ran around outside. My family interpreted my skill at jigsaw puzzles as the signature of a budding civil engineer, rather than the logical result of hours of practice.
My father is a COBOL programmer. He dropped out of university study in chemistry and worked in various unskilled odd jobs after that. One day he saw an ad looking for programmers to work at the Post Office, no experience required … so he applied. He’d never touched a computer before in his life, and he got all his training on the job.
I went to his work Christmas parties and what-not, and met quite a few of his colleagues. There were a lot of women; in fact, they probably outnumbered men. They had similar backgrounds – they worked in lower-skilled office jobs and then at some point they landed a job where they were paid to learn how to code.
The previous generation had no shortage of women in tech, so what’s happened and why are there now twice as many young men than women studying ICT subjects in New Zealand? I found an explanation recently in an article from the NPR which investigated the drop in female computer science students in the USA.
They found that the introduction of personal computers into homes in the 1980s was to blame. Until that point, children had no access to computers as they were growing up. Instead people got into the career of programming as adults, often more or less by accident – just like my dad.
When the Commodore 64 and its peers came out, computers became toys that children could experiment with in their own homes. And because our culture feels the need to maintain gender norms by categorising toys as “boys’ toys” or “girls’ toys”, computers were marketed to boys. Boys grew up already knowing a bit about computers and were more likely to consider a career in ICT. Young women became less interested in the field because computers were seen as something complicated and mysterious that only a man could understand.
The most depressing quote from the NPR article? “[Margolis] found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls – even when their girls were really interested in computers.” This finding is eerily similar to one of the quotes I pulled from the MYOB report, because even in 2018 in New Zealand, parents think of computers as a boys’ thing.
What’s the Solution?
Stop it with the toy gendering. Let kids play with whatever they’re interested in, and encourage all kids to explore a range of activities, from crafts to coding. Don’t make assumptions about what careers men or women typically do in front of your kids – or preferably, don’t do it at all because Girls Can Do Anything and so can boys.
Hopefully the changes afoot to our digital technologies curriculum, which will see basic coding taught at primary and intermediate schools, will help as well. This will rely on our teachers to remember that girls and boys can both excel at STEM subjects though – an attitude that is sadly not present at every school.