This is an edited version of a talk I gave at the Monash Faculty of IT Celebration of Ada Lovelace day.
When my oldest was about 2 years old, her grandmother was taking her for a walk and said “Look at the big flower, Zoe!”. Cool as a cucumber, Zoe replied witheringly: “It’s a protea, Grandma.”
Now, it wasn’t that Zoe was a genius. It’s that I’m a huge plant nerd and always told her the names of the plants we saw about the place.
It’s about the opportunities she had, and the assumptions we make. If we assume kids aren’t smart enough to learn the names of things, we won’t tell them the names of things.
And if we assume girls aren’t capable of doing computing, we won’t give them the opportunity to learn computing.
Many years ago I was at a STEM education lunch at a fancy private school. Elizabeth Finkel, editor of Cosmos Science Magazine at the time, was asked a question about girls in STEM, and she said we didn’t really have a problem with gender balance, because the lack of girls in the “hard” sciences like Physics and Computing was balanced by the large numbers of girls in the “soft” sciences like Biology and Psychology. She said girls have naturally greater affinity and aptitude for those subjects.
When question time came around, my hand shot up so fast it fried the air, and I gave what I admit was a comment, not a question. I said that when we give girls the same opportunities, the same encouragement, and the same influences as boys, and we still see them choosing Biology over Computing, THEN I’ll accept that girls just aren’t interested in Computing, and don’t have the aptitude for it.
That was ten years or so ago, I think, and we really haven’t come as far as we like to think we have.
We continue to give boys spatial coordination toys like train sets and blocks, and girls social toys like dolls and soft toys, and then we say boys are better at the kinds of skills that spatial coordination underpins – Like Maths and Computing – even though the evidence shows that girls perform equally well – in fact, on average, slightly better – at maths and computing in primary school.
What we do see is that girls’ confidence drops quickly, under the societal messaging that maths and computing are fields for boys, not for girls. Kids are very sensitive to the messages about what they are and aren’t supposed to do and be. Not to mention the question of where that leaves non binary kids, who are, perhaps, more free to choose their own paths, but certainly not free of the gendered pressures society imposes on us all.
When I was a kid my cousin Chris, who knew me well, and didn’t fall for the gendered messaging, gave me his Commodore 64. An old machine that plugged into our living room tv, with a clunky tape drive which took forever to rewind, it was life changing. I loved writing lines of BASIC and making the computer do embarrassingly simple but, to me, incredibly fascinating things.
As a young teenager, I was obsessed with the Infocom Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, which is really just a different form of programming. I loved computers. I loved solving problems, and here I am with a PhD in Computer Science. Because of support and encouragement in a few key places, and some interesting problems to solve, I managed to dodge the gendered messaging.
Not that I intended to study Computer Science. I came to university expecting to do a degree in Genetics. By third year all of my subjects were computer science subjects, and I still don’t quite know how that happened. After my honours year, Damian Conway offered me an interesting and important problem, and suddenly I was enrolled in a PhD. The rest, as they say, is history. In hindsight, I really just followed the most interesting and meaningful paths I could see, with no clear plan for where I’d end up.
There’s increasingly strong evidence that getting girls into STEM in general, and Computing in particular, is a matter of giving them real problems to solve. Showing them that computers are powerful tools they can use to make real change.
And yet. When it comes to Girls in STEM programs, we still see an awful lot of “pinkification”. A suggestion that we need to make Computing different in order to interest girls. To make it more fun, more feminine. More fluffy. Like International Women’s day, it all too often comes down to pink cupcakes and 3 D printed jewellery. “Girly” things.
And it’s not working. Just looking at VCE student numbers, it’s clear we still have a problem. In 2023 168 boys completed VCE Algorithmics, and just 23 girls. That’s just 12% girls. For Data Analytics, there were around 18% girls. Applied Computing had 16% girls and .5% non binary kids. And Software Development had just under 12% girls and 0.1% non binary kids. This is not a critique of those subjects. That’s a different talk. Rather, it’s indicative that the problem has to be solved well before VCE. In fact, it’s primary school where we lose kids. Where they decide that computing is irrelevant, not interesting, and not fun. Where they become convinced that it’s too hard for them.
What’s worse, if we view the data through the most optimistic lens and assume no student does more than one computing subject (definitely false), then the total percentage of students doing a computing subject is only 11% of the cohort. In reality, it’s probably quite a bit lower.
When I was teaching Computer Science to year 10s at John Monash Science School, we started by teaching with toys. We had them program robots to push each other out of circles, and draw pretty pictures with Scratch. Their disinterest was palpable. When I shifted to using Data Science instead, getting the kids to solve real problems, we doubled the number of girls in the year 11 Computer Science elective. More than that, though, we also increased the number of boys and non binary kids choosing computing.
If we want greater diversity in Computing, and more importantly, if we want a computer literate population, including our policy makers and legislators, then we need to stop repeating our old mistakes and only successfully engaging the small subset of the population that we’ve been reaching for decades. We need to engage everyone, and to do that we need to make it meaningful. We don’t need to change computing to interest girls. We need to give them the real stuff. Show them the value. Give them the tools they need to change the world.
This is why my organisation, the Australian Data Science Education Institute, exists. We are a charity dedicated to supporting teachers, creating resources, and advocating for curriculum change. We build authentic problem solving into school education so that kids learn that computing and data science are tools they can use to solve problems, and to create positive change in their own communities, not just toys that have no relevance to their lives.
Because girls are just the easily measured part of our diversity problem. When we try to market computing as a fun toy, we push away all the kids – girls, boys, non- binary and all – who don’t find it particularly fun, and who can’t see the point. When we empower them, instead, to use computing to change the world, we give them a reason to do it, which in turn helps them believe that they can. Girls, like everybody, have a place in computing. We just have to give them a reason to want it!
You can support ADSEI’s work at givenow.com.au/adsei/