What really matters for women when choosing tech?
How to encourage girls' interest in tech — Newsletter No.14
In order to tackle the issues related to workplace diversity, Google conducted a comprehensive study to identify and understand the factors that influence young women’s decisions to pursue degrees in Computer Science.
The findings can be of great value for every parent who wants to enable their daughter to make her own choice, and not allow society's expectations and limits to do it for her.
Let’s dig in 👇
What doesn’t matter?
The factors you can’t control play a minimal role. These include:
household income
ethnicity
having a family member in a Computer Science related field
having a family member with a Computer Science degree
geography
There are also some controllable factors that turned out not relevant:
early exposure to technology
age of first computer exposure
access to mobile devices
natural aptitude
topical depth/breadth of existing pre-college Computer Science curriculum.
This means that while factors like natural aptitude and the breadth of academic exposure may influence success in the field, they don’t necessarily lead to making the decision to enter the field.
Now read on to see what is important 👇
What really matters?
Positive reinforcement of Computer Science pursuits and a personal belief that such a pursuit can be successful. Peer encouragement is almost as important as familial support. Moreover, for both the high school and the college model, parental occupation was statistically insignificant.
What matters most is encouragement, not whether this encouragement was from someone with technical expertise. This is particularly important given that young women are half as likely as young men to receive that encouragement (in any form).
Self-perception — a girl’s interest in and perceptions of her own proficiency in Mathematics and problem-solving significantly influence the decision to pursue a Computer Science degree.
Early exposure to computer science is important because familiarity with a subject can generate interest and curiosity while establishing a sense of competency. Moreover, even a basic understanding of Computer Science provides insight into viable career paths within the field and how those careers can be leveraged to achieve personal goals.
The key takeaway is that the type of participation is statistically insignificant when measured against having been exposed at all. This is very much a case of “anything is better than nothing”.
Career perception — a young woman’s perception of Computer Science and
its associated careers are the second most potent explainable factor influencing the pursuit of a Computer Science degree.
So, not understanding Computer Science as a discipline makes an informed decision more difficult and, a flawed perception of the discipline actively dissuades young women from considering it. The end result is that young women unfamiliar with Computer Science and its broad applications have difficulty visualizing it outside the narrow scope often presented in popular media.
What now?
By subscribing to this newsletter you are already doing a lot, as here you’ll find resources to act on all the aspects:
We’ll give you recommendations of activities, projects, books, movies, and much more which will help for early exposure (remember, this is what you get every other week)
Our recommendations are broad, so will provide you with resources for sharing perception of computer science. The findings of the report showed that young women’s perceptions of computer science significantly impacted their desire to pursue that career.
those who were FAMILIAR with computer science offered positive word associations (CS is FUN, INTERESTING, or EXCITING, for example) with the profession.
those who were UNFAMILIAR with computer science offered negative associations with related careers (CS is BORING, HARD, or DIFFICULT).
Share positive reinforcement! Social encouragement is the most significant factor and it is up to you to empower your daughter, convince her that she can do technology well, and fight a bunch of biases she will meet in her life. Our newsletter will help here by providing you bunch of role models and other resources to help you do it.
We’ll help you diversify activities you do with your kids, so they are better equipped to take on various challenges related to math and technology. And that will lead them to better self-perception when it comes to association with technology.
Thanks for reading and see you next week with actionable recommendations! Some of you already shared with us cool activities and games your daughters love, and we can’t wait to share them with all of you :)