dot.life

Girls get geekier

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 29 Feb 08, 17:41 GMT

Any time I come across software developers or visit an IT business, one thing immediately strikes me – where are the women? For all the talk of girl geeks, computing - and technology more generally - is still a very male-dominated business. Even a few months back at a meeting of would-be Facebook application developers – a very young crowd - there must have been ten men for every woman.

But that could be about to change. A new survey out today from a major supermarket (no, I’m not going to name them – but the research looks reasonably sound) suggests that girls may now be better at some computing tasks than boys. The survey of more than a thousand 7-16 year olds found that girls were more likely to know how to create a word document, put a profile on a social network or upload a video onto YouTube. And whereas 10% of the boys said they were not confident with computers, the figure for the girls was just 6%.

I visited Brentside High School in West London today to film a report on this subject – and found an ICT class where the girls seemed at least as clued-up as the boys. They were 13 and 14 year olds who seemed confident about everything from using a spreadsheet to building their own websites.

The teacher herself, Varinder Randhawa, said much had changed since she left university a couple of years ago. “I remember I was one of five girls out of a class of 160,” she told me. “And in the programming classes I was the only one there”. Now, though, she is finding that her female pupils are just as keen on asking questions in class as the boys, and more and more of them are opting to study ICT.

What appears to be happening is that Web 2.0 – the social internet – is breaking down the gender barriers. Girls are more keen on using computers as communication tools, rather than bashing orcs and stealing virtual cars in the games which occupy the boys for so many hours. But in ten years’ time will the girls from Brentside High be competing for jobs as software developers? Let’s hope so.

UPDATE:

Some of you have suggested – with some justification – that a survey carried out for a supermarket may not provide rock-solid evidence for my theory that gender barriers are coming down in computing. Well here’s something rather better – a report from the respected Pew Internet and American Life Project which found that teenage girls were far more likely to create content on the internet than boys – though in this report boys were more prolific when it came to posting videos. This is about American teenagers, but I would be surprised if the same pattern is not repeated in the UK.

And some of you have dismissed this kind of activity as trivial compared with the hard grind of writing code. I suppose it comes down to where you think the whole technology industry is heading over the next few years – and whether the sort of skills that girls are now developing will be in demand. I think they will be.

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