Girls are still not interested in tech
How to encourage girls' interest in tech — An out of ordinary Newsletter No.36
Recent report by Google and Gallup focused on analyzing gender gap among US students from 5 to 18 year old and it showed that, although the overall interest of students to learn computer science grew to 40%, the interest of girls (25%) is twice as lower than of boys (50%).
Parents and guardians are also biased — those of boys are more eager to have their child pursue a career in CS (42%) than parents and guardians of girls (27%).
When moving out of the topic of pursuing Computer science as a calling, but just learning it to advance in other fields, we still have a large gender discrepancy.
However, if girls and boys report that they spend at least an hour a week studying computer science at school, they are both more likely to say that learning computer science is important.
For me, it was especially interesting that girls are just as likely as boys to say they learned computer science at school this year. About half of both girls and boys say they learned CS at school in the past year, though fewer girls than boys learned CS outside of school (20% vs. 35%). Still, slightly more girls (59%) than boys (51%) say, on average, they spend no time in a typical week learning CS at school.
If you want to check out the full report, you can find it here.
What does this mean?
Although kids (and parents and teachers) value the importance of technology for their career development more, there is still a large gender gap.
And, if you are reading this newsletter, it means you already know that being comfortable with technology will make life of our kids much easier in their personal and career development, since as predicted — software is eating the world.
This is exactly why this newsletter exists - to help parents understand the challenges girls have when choosing a career, and more precisely perceiving technology. If we have to summarize, it would be: Introduce them to technology from an early age, and connect it with their interests.
You have a bunch of suggestions to do so in our previous editions, and new ones will be in your inbox — we’ll help you stay consistent!