How to Inspire Young Women to Become Technologists

More Women Will Maintain Interest in Computer Science When Courses Make Room for Creativity

It was 2008. At the beginning of middle school, the administrators added a mandatory computer course to my schedule. I’d been playing computer games since the age of two, and, to my parents’ dismay, loved to take apart electronics. I was ecstatic to learn more about those strange and wonderful machines that created such delightful experiences.

As pre-teens, the young women in my class had already experienced over a decade of gendered socialization. From what we saw in the media, our role models, and from our social groups, we were encouraged to be creative, gentle, and artistic (In other words: girly). With copies of Twilight in our pink and purple book bags and ribbons in our ponytails, we’d skip over to a classroom filled with CRT monitors and hardware from the 90s.

After our computer course got through basic how-to and typing, we finally moved on to the real stuff: coding. Except, what the course taught didn’t really cover the diversity of code. Instead of discovering what communicating with a computer could allow you to do, my class typed lines of code as our teacher directed us to create a boyish game that I had no interest in. The graphics we added…