Junior high girls get with computer science
This content was reported on and written by a high school student for the University of Idaho’s annual journalism workshop.
Four years ago Julie Amador, assistant professor at the University of Idaho’s College of Education, noticed northern Idaho lacked applied math and science teaching and that it wasn’t offered for girls.
To remedy this, she and her partners wrote a grant to start a coding camp for young women called Dig’n IT. The camp, which ran June 22 to June 26, was offered for free to incoming sixth to ninth grade girls.
Amador said participants had to submit applications with interest statements and teacher recommendations. They learned about coding, graphic design and web development at Dig’n IT.
Amador said she specifically picked junior high school girls because she saw research that showed by the time girls enter junior high, they start to steer away from math and science and, guided by stereotypes, the subjects move away from what may be considered more of a boys’ club.
According to Code.org, an organization that encourages people and their communities to get interested in coding, of all the high school students taking advanced placement classes, just under one percent are enrolled in advanced placement computer science and 15 percent of that is made up of women.
The field is predominantly male. Of all computer science degrees, 12 percent go to women, according to Code.org.
Emery Beattie studies computer science at the University of Idaho, and said he has taken notice of the trend.
“There’s definitely a smaller number of women in my classes,” Beattie said. “I think a lot of resources for computer science pre-college being targeted a lot towards boys contributes a lot to it.”
Amador said she believes the reason women have departed from computer science is because of the discouragement young women face, especially regarding gender roles.
“I think, for the most part, science has been assumed to be a ‘man’s field’ for a long time, or that girls shouldn’t do it,” Beattie said. “And because of that, a lot of girls might feel like they just shouldn’t, or girls who would like to participate in science get excluded socially from a lot of those potential resources.”
The small percentage may be due to the dawn of the personal computer around 1985 when it was typically marketed to young males for gaming purposes, touting graphic games that would have been considered inappropriate for girls at the time, according to NPR’s Planet Money.
“I feel like a lot of women in computer science are portrayed as really one dimensional,” Beattie said. “Like if they’re in computer science then they’re 100 percent computer science and they can’t be anything else with their lives.”
Beattie said it would make a big impact on the social atmosphere of the area if women were more welcomed into the world of computer science.
With this camp, Amador said she hopes the girls leave with an improved attitude towards math and science. She said she hopes to motivate young girls to find their place and shift the gender gap so it is equal between men and women.
Amador said her advice for young women unsure of pursuing math and science fields is to go for it and “give it your best try, because you’ll never know where it will take you.”
Sabrina Castellanos | Guest Writer