Computing’s Narrow Focus May Hinder Women’s Participation: Context matters

Of course, I buy into the argument here about the importance of context. Beyond that, this article does a nice job of tying context to success of women in computing (with quotes both from Barbara Ericson and Valerie Barr, formerly at NSF).

“Boys fall in love with computers as machines; girls see them as tools to do something else,” said Barbara Ericson, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who tracks the AP exam. “Then girls think, ‘maybe I don’t belong because I don’t love them like the boys do.’”

…

In her position as a professor of computer science at Union College, Barr found contextualizing computer science classes led to an increase in female enrollment. “We said, ‘let’s show them that computer science can be useful by giving themes to the introductory CS courses, so students can see their relevance,’” she said. “For us, it’s been enormously successful. Ten years ago we taught the introductory course to 29 students, and 14% of them were women. This year there were over 200 students, and 39% of them were women.” Beyond college, Barr said, she’d also like to see “a bigger funnel into the corporate world and the tech industry, with people coming from many other majors. It doesn’t have to be just CS majors.”

via Computing’s Narrow Focus May Hinder Women’s Participation | News | Communications of the ACM.