On Cracking the Girl Code: How to End the Tech Gender Gap

Girls Who Code is a fantastic US based not-for-profit that addresses the tech gender gap by offering activities that specifically support young girls with an interest in computer science. At its most practical – the NFP runs summer courses (seven weeks) for groups of girls around the country. The courses are facilitated by a trainer with financial support from a major tech companies.

Some background stats (US centric): only 12% of computer science graduates are female. Code.org estimates that by 2020 US universities will not be able to fill even a third of the country’s 1.4 million computing positions with qualified graduates. The industry needs to tap all areas of the economy to find skilled employees. Girls Who Code has gone from graduating 20 girls in 2012 to approx 3,000 in 2014. 95% of who go on to study computer science at university. Another insight is that girls place higher expectations on themselves – at a university level girls are likely to drop out if their marks hit a B+ while boys are happy with a B-.

The article outlines some strategies used by Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California to raise the percentage of women graduating from computer science from 10% to 40% in seven years.

These include:

• Emphasise problem-solving real-world issues because girls tend to want to help their communities.
• Group projects: research shows that girls flourish when they collaborate with others.
• Role models: help girls build a network of like minded people – a challenge as there are so few high-profile female programmers as role models

 

On university and industry perceptions of Australia’s ICT industry

Report: “Addressing ICT curriculum recommendations from surveys of academics, workplace graduates and employers” (University of Wollongong et al, 2012) [LINK]

Today I’m going to look the first (of five) issues raised in this report: perception (pages 26-43). These insights come from a survey conducted with 18 notable universities and up to 182 industry professionals (with large representation from Australian Computing Society membership). The survey looks at ICT industry perceptions from two target groups: a) universities looking to increase student enrolments, and b) industry looking to increase quantity and quality of employees.

[Extract] …poor perceptions of the ICT industry and profession are having a severe impact on the quality and quantity of people being attracted to ICT careers

The key issues resulting from the surveys are:

• a lack of knowledge/understanding of how different factors actually affect ICT enrolments
• collaborative activities between natural competitors (such as universities competing for students and graduates) are effective
• the concept of the “ICT profession” (really comprising a number of ICT professions) is complex, deriving at least in part from its multifaceted nature, and is neither well specified, communicated to, nor understood by key stakeholders
• improved understanding and perception of ICT is needed in terms of social (what it achieves) and industrial benefit rather than in academic or technical terms (what ICT is and does technically).

Universities:

All universities agreed that to increase ICT enrolments, student perceptions of the ICT professional would need to be more positive. Makes sense. 68% of universities said they had an effective student outreach program including activities such as visits to schools, offering university courses to high school students and teacher professional development. Further areas of outreach could include: publicising high levels of employment for ICT graduates, more aggressive publicity of job opportunities, ICT across diverse industry sectors and a focus on the social aspects of technology. The report suggests that current university efforts are more about winning individual market share and that a focus on broadly increasing ICT industry perceptions would improve all enrolments.

University Conclusion: University outreach activities need to be less-focused on institutional promotion and more focused on raising ICT industry perceptions, and that collaborative efforts with industry and other institutions need to be undertaken as appropriate in pursuit of this goal

Industry:

Industry was undecided as to whether there is a perception issue (43% agree, 33% disagree). However only 12% agreed that industry attempts to raise public perception if ICT were successful while 30% disagreed. Current activities include (unsuccessful) attempts to engage with schools directly, IBM’s Excite program and the I Choose Technology (Group X) program in Queensland. In general, industry respondents believed that their own attempts to raise public perception of ICT have been unsuccessful.

Industry Conclusion: the collective promotional activities by industry to improve perceptions of ICT should be improved by including a focus on social benefits resulting from the application of ICT in different industry sectors.

A question of marketing:

72% of industry responses said that a marketing campaign for ICT as a profession would improve perceptions (8% said no). The campaign needs to differentiate between the different types of ICT jobs that people can do (i.e. technical vs non-technical) and in a diverse range of industry sectors (health, mining, finance etc). Respondents liked CPA’s (Certified Practising Accountants) campaign to drive perceptions and quality for accredited accountants – but then again the survey responses mainly came from people involved in the tech industry’s equivalent – the Australian Computing Society.

My Conclusion:

I liked this article. It was a really interesting insight into the collective thoughts of universities and industry (mainly ACS reps). The main points I pulled were that a collaborative effort between all universities would increase total student numbers. Also, that individually industry was struggling to get cut through with their efforts to increase perceptions of ICT. A key issue seems to be the definition of the tech industry – does ‘tech’ relate to awesome startups smashing it on a global stage or does it relate to that trapped, lonely IT guy that resets your password on the first day back from holidays. Is a career in tech a globe trotting world of investments, pitching and trips to San Francisco – or is it living in fear that your job will be outsourced and you’ll have no competitive skills?

One issue with this survey is that it mainly includes the perceptions of ACS members – it doesn’t capture the boundless energy and creativity coming from the startup scene – a collective that may not see the need for professional accreditation by the ACS.