Dive Brief:
- In a Girls Who Code course hosted this summer by the Florida State University, female students taught robots to dance, worked in groups to fix coding problems, and gained confidence for entering the male-dominated tech field.
- The course is one way Florida educators are trying to get more girls involved in computer science and tech, as few currently enter STEM fields.
- Meanwhile, Miami-Dade schools have introduced computer science classes as early as kindergarten, in part to engage female students in technology early on.
Dive Insight:
The statistics on gender disparities in technology are discouraging and it seems that the problem likely starts early. Less than 26% of computer and math jobs are held by women. Fewer than one in five computer science degrees are held by women, despite the fact that women make up more than half of all undergraduate students and half of undergraduate science students. One Miami administrator recalled asking winners at a school science fair — largely girls — what careers they intended to purse. Few named tech-related jobs.
“Have we noticed a gender gap? Absolutely,” Cristian Carranza, who works in Miami-Dade's Office of Academics and Transformation, told eSchool News. “They have aptitude, they are doing really, really well, but they are choosing career paths that don’t reflect the aptitude they show at the expo.”
Some of it may be social feedback, however, as students in the coding course said they had been told computers were for boys, not girls.
