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1: Lindax at 1:36 pm on Sunday, December 3, 2006

Careful. That’s not my experience with my eighth grade daughter and her circle of friends. They pursue these activities yes, AND they believe they are good at them. Computer science does not equate to digital media. Currently these are different fields and departments, albeit related.

I do see an erosion of confidence when she and her friends consider the backside of digital media, the man-behind-the-curtain part of the magic. And here, I don’t mean making web pages, I mean computer science. For this, I blame public education, and I expect little if any transformation to occur there, given its insitutional history and sociopolitical baggage. That would be why, if it is going happen, the gender revolution will (have to) come from our middle class daughters who find their way to compsci and engineering through luck or intentional support of families with money.

My 8th grade daughter and her circle of friends are digital content producers…outside of school. In school, my kid is suffering through a horrific science experience. Her passion for physics is dying by the day as her physics teacher primes the class for the standardized test (and demonstrates her own fragile understanding of the field). My daughter’s passion for engineering struggles for life against the experience of being one of three girls in the woodshop class, where she is subject to what would be considered actionable harrassment in the workplace. Her desire to engage in content production led her to the afterschool Writers’ Cafe club, which doesn’t use computers or digital photography, and which demonstrates no awareness of digital venues for publication.

But she is a middle class girl whose mom is a professor in a related field. So, she will go to computer camp again this summer, where she will again be one of two or three girls, and the only one interested in programming and game development. THe others one or two will be in webpage design or digital photography. She has had the good fortune to see the MIT Media Lab in person and harbors fantasies of going there. What attracted her? She clearly saw it as a media invention sandbox. She understood the embodied metaphor quite clearly. Willl she get there? She has many, many real and psychological obstacles in her way and few resources outside her parents.

Where is the organized, focused, outreach? Where is the engagement from women in the field? Hmm, time to write an afterschool grant program that targets girls specifically. And I’m tellin’ ya, middle school is the age to go for, i.e., before the tracking in high school forces her into a humanities major as public education continues its use of math as an obstacle. Middle school is all about identity, especially for girls. If we’re serious about gender equity in this field it’s time to move resources that match the size of our concern. As a mom, I’d rather not wait for a decade of research.

2: jwindish at 2:04 pm on Sunday, December 3, 2006

Two answers: media messages (Is it only me or has anyone else noticed that the comsumer press implies that it’s men buying up all those Hi-Def flat screen TVs?) and the bravado culture of IT. It’s pin-up, macho and male!

I think IT has a lot to learn and could benefit greatly from taking on some of the ways of the library (a historically female occupation).

The library has been deeply impacted and will be completely transformed by the networked world. With the library’s long legacy of opening up information to the public, protecting privacy, serving the patron and, significantly, securing public funding and using sophisticated tech systems, it’s just too damned bad that it’s not the other way around.

3: Anastasia Goodstein from Publisher, Ypulse.com, author, Totally Wired at 5:04 pm on Sunday, December 3, 2006

Hi Justine. I don’t know if you remember me—I used to work at Teen Voices in Boston and had you on a panel at “Cybersmith” called Get Online Girl! back in the 90s.

I feel like just as we tried to do back then, role modeling and mentoring is so important when it comes to career paths. Having professional women geeks come into classrooms or after school programs and talk, especially to girls, about the opportunities in tech, and how they can apply all the skills they may not realize they have, is essential.

I recently spoke to girls at the Texas Conference for Women, and one girl spoke up about how she is so into html and Web design and was asking Mena Trott (founder of Six Apart) how Mena learned to build web sites and applications. None of us on the panel were computer engineers so we talked about how a lot of it was experiential, learn by doing, using programs like Web Monkey to find code, try something, see how it looks and then go fix it. We have to find a way to identify these girls and inspire them to want build the applications that create these blogs, websites or even video games.

As for the big “why”? I think the “girls are good at English and history and boys are good at math and science myth” is hard coded in our families, culture and in teachers. Just as institutional racism often plays out on an unconscious level so does sexism, especially with older teachers.

If you haven’t, check out what the Girl Scouts are doing to address this issue here at Girls Go Tech.

I also think there is something to girls wanting to be perceived as feminine or “girly.” There was an article in the Washington Post (the link is broken right now) about how tech companies are targeting the “fashionista” set with pink, sleek, feminine gadgets. Maybe there is a way to link some of these gadgets girls may covet or have with the opportunity to help create them (part of me cringes at this b/c of the gender stereotypes involved, but if it helps them get interested in making tech…)

4: ElKevbo at 8:51 pm on Monday, December 4, 2006

In the second sentence of the her first paragraph, Justine mentions a “recent Kaiser Family Foundation Report on youth and technology showed no difference in boys’ and girls’ use of technology….”  I’ve looked on the KFF website and I can’t seem to pinpoint the report to which Justine is referring.  Can someone please point me in the right direction?  Thanks!

5: Justine Cassell from Northwestern University at 11:19 pm on Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Dear ElKevbo,

Take a look at

Rideout, V., Roberts, D.F., & Foehr, U.G. (2005). Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 year olds.
Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation.

6: Justine Cassell from Northwestern University at 11:38 pm on Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Hi All,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments.  It may be hard to reply to all of your insightful posts at once, but here goes:

*Linda: First of all, you will be happy to learn that many many many intiatives target middle school girls.  Probably the majority of interventions target that age group these days, including the intervention of the Girl Scouts that Anastasia mentions (and, by the way, Anastasia, I was featured as a “tech diva” on the site when it was launched a couple of years ago!).

Professional women in CS are also reaching out to young women in unparalleled numbers.  I suggest you check out the activities of NCWIT (the National Center for Women in Technology) - they will soon be making available their “outreach in a box” kit so that you and your colleagues can also engage in best practices in outreach with young women.

Secondly, I think you and I are talking about the same phenomenon.  Your daughter thinks she’s good at digital media, but doesn’t think she’ll succeed at Computer Science.  I don’t mean to imply that it’s *her fault* that she feels this way - my whole point is that there is a social construction (as Jwindish says, media messages) of women as technically incompetent that does not seem to be changed by the fact that women are now using digital technology in record numbers.

In my own life in Computer Science I have tried very hard to serve both as mentor and role-model.  During the 9 years that I was faculty at the MIT Media Lab, I ran yearly “survival skills for women in academia” groups for college and graduate students, quarterly events for women faculty, and yearly talks in middle schools, highschools and libraries (including the panel that Anastasia ran, all those years ago).  Unfortunately, during those 9 years, neither the percentage of women faculty, nor the percentage of women students rose at the Media Lab, and I am still only the 3rd female faculty member to have been tenured in the Media Lab since it opened.

Anastasia, I agree with you that there seems to be a renewed push to be girly among young women (although this is not a topic that I have data on).  And, I am struck that today, 10 years after Henry Jenkins and I published _From Barbie to Mortal Kombat_ we are still dealing with the very same issues.  In fact, I suspect that there has even been a backlash in response to the 1990s push to get more girls into Computer Science . . . Henry Jenkins and I have written a forward to the new volume “Beyond Barbie to Mortal Kombat” on exactly this issue (it’s available on my website, and is titled “From Quake Girrrls to Desperate Housewives: a Decade of Gender and Computer Games” !!

All of your comments have helped me clarify my own position - thanks!

-justine

7: Mechelle De Craene from James Buchanan Middle School at 11:55 pm on Monday, January 1, 2007

Hi Professor Cassell,

Re: “So, if girls are using digital media - mashing, authoring, blogging, communicating - why don’t they feel that they are good at those activities?”

I’m not so sure that it is that girls don’t feel that they are “good” at these things, but other factors that contribute to career choice.

I think that Lady Winchilsea sums it up really well in her poem, which was published in Viginia Woolf’s book A Room of One’s Own.
 

Lady Winchilsea (b.1661)

How are we fallen! Fallen by mistaken rules,
And Education’s more than Natures fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed;

And if some one would soar above the rest,
With warmer fancy, and ambition pressed,
So strong the opposing faction still appears,
The hopes to thrive can ne’er outweigh the fears.

Moreover, perhaps, career choices for many gifted women even still today in the 21st Century are similar in many regards to Woolf’s character Shakespeare’s sister Judith?

8: Sim at 12:35 am on Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Hmmm… I guess boys and girls are simply inherently different in terms of preferences.

9: Steve at 5:29 pm on Wednesday, February 20, 2008

I think you raise some important points when talking about how the sexes see more technical professions but I work with more than one female IT professional and if they are determined they are as good if not better than the males in the industry.