This comment from an Alpha Game reader should suffice to explain why all the efforts to push girls into technology careers are destined to fail:
Recently had an opportunity to observe an event specifically designed to expose high school girls to programming and coding. The event had corporate sponsors and top flight IT professionals. Workshops were designated for Code Divas and Design Duchesses.
A team of 20something women – ostensibly there to either relate and demonstrate how STEMMY girls wound up being successful or serve just to serve as relatable emotional conduit for the girls – were on hand. They primarily passed the time on phones checking Facebook or whispering about how living arrangements with Mr. So-and-So were frustrating them. Or so I overheard.
The high school girls with high SMV followed the basic directions in the workshop assignments, played with their hair, and generally looked bored. A couple of achiever girls actually thought outside the box and did some coding options that didn’t need hand-holding by the instructor.
When visiting information kiosks set up by local colleges and universities, the institutional reps asked the girls what their plans were for college. Of those I heard one-third didn’t know, one-third were entering health care (i.e. nursing), and one-third wanted to start their own business. Out of 60+ girls, less than 3 were actively interested pursuing anything programming or coding.
What could be taken from this event? The young women enjoyed the day, learned a few things, took the free stuff laid out to them, and less than 1% of them will become programmers or coders.
An effective use of resources, no doubt. The planners could probably get better results by recruiting from the stoners smoking behind the trash bins. The college plans indicate that 90 percent of these young women would be happiest becoming wives and mothers, as its the one profession that combines nursing with entrepreneurial activity. It’s interesting to see that teaching, which was once a young woman’s preferred form of ersatz motherhood, has become less popular as the schools become ever more vibrant.
This sick thing about our society is that we are actively dissuading these young women from doing what they want to do, what they are designed to do, and what society needs them to do, in favor of trying to coerce them into doing what they don’t want to do, what they’re not very good at, and what society has absolutely no need of them doing.
We’re seeing more women, like the policewomen in the UK and the female marine in the USA, angrily pointing out that they were set up for failure. And that is exactly what is happening to these “Code Divas” and “Design Duchesses”. Pushing careers they don’t want on them isn’t a way to empower or liberate women, it is a cruel means of turning them from the domestic queens they were meant to be into sterile, sub-par worker bees chiefly employed as office sex toys.
