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No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

code.likeagirl.io

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Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#141

Post by guywaffle »

jayd16 wrote: post #125
softawre wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gamer->modder->hacker path This doesn't exist today? What about Minecraft mods, or building Redstone circuits? Game modding is as big as it was when I went through that cycle, isn't it? At least, that's what I plan to show my daughter when she gets a bit older to test her interest.

Games are often male dominated and the culture can be toxic.

The gaming “culture” ain’t got nothing on Twitter.

Basically, any platform a person can hide behind a screen is going to have toxic people. Gaming is a lot better about keeping the community in check than ANY social media company.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#142

Post by dragonwriter »

imiric wrote: post #119
twobyfour wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing except to start accepting women as equally capable as men and equally likely to have an interest in the profession.

At what level in the IT industry do you feel that this is not the case? Education (at home, early, primary, secondary, higher?), in the workplace (companies are biased against women?), or somewhere else (conferences, meetups, trainings, etc.)? It seems that lack of "acceptance" is thrown around to explain this phenomenon, but it's not clear what and where should be improved to change this.

I've seen it personally at all levels of education you list, plus in workplaces, as well as in other places. Now, not in every example of each, but in enough that, while I'm sometimes surprised at the extent, I'm never, anymore, surprised to find it in ant context.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#143

Post by Danihan »

ucaetano wrote: post #137
stinkytaco wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for computer science, that does seem to be the case. But not for engineering, physical sciences or math. And considering that most people are granted a degree before they enter the workforce, I don't believe it can entirely be the workforce culture that's deterring them. So I guess I would argue that it's just as likely to be how we message technology as how we treat women in the workforce, if not both.

Or it could be that computer science (what most people refer as "tech") came to be dominated by the boy's club videogame/nerd culture from the early 80's, which pushed women out. It goes back to another topic here on HN: I don't know of any other career so dominated by a culture as SWE/tech.

Sure, I think you're probably correct that rampant video game culture probably did begin to alienate women, even back in the eighties, since they saw that computers were mostly being used as tools for violent competition and most women were not very interested in that.

That's where our opinions will probably diverge though, because I also believe boys glean more enjoyment from video games simply because they are biologically-predisposed to enjoy violent / high-stakes competitions more intensely.

http://www.radford.edu/~mzorrilla2/thesis/differencesinplay....

http://assets.ngin.com/attachments/document/0042/7590/Do_Boy...

It's not just video games, look at the gender ratios in competitive poker, or chess, or debate. All very similar.

Since there seems to be a strong chance that the root of the problem is innate / hormonal / biological it's not an issue that's "easy" to even rationally discuss, let alone solve, as you keep stating throughout the thread.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#144

Post by twobyfour »

klipt wrote: post #132
twobyfour wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution for my parents was to send me to an all-girls school with a feminist bent. That had its own drawbacks in plenty, but the upside was an upbringing relatively free of gender stereotypes. And talk to them about it. If they're hearing one thing from their friends and another at home, they will experience cognitive dissonance, and they will wonder about it, even if they don't know to ask about it. Edited to a…

Or it's just data driven marketing. "Research shows that sales and profits go up when we make girls' toys pink." "Okay then, make girls' toys pink!" Anyway, my guess is that whatever strategy would encourage the majority of women to go into programming isn't necessarily something women on hacker news would like, because women on hacker news are part of the self selected minority who already buck gender trends. You do…

You make a very good point!

I'll just note that some of us who might have been most attracted to the profession would be turned off by pinkification, and that we may be harder to recruit into recruiting efforts that we perceive as ghettoizing. I quit a women's organization dedicated to a specific technology because all the meetups they organized seemed to be oriented around manicures.

Someone mentioned above that law and medicine have evened out (or even begun to invert) their gender ratios over the past generation. They didn't do that by pinkifying the profession - by giving little girls pink stethescopes or gavels. They did that by changing expectations of who turns out to be a doctor or lawyer - the expectations of both children who hadn't yet chosen their profession and of the adults who guide their choices; choose whether to admit them into study programs; and eventually hire them.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#145

Post by kwhitefoot »

jandrese wrote: post #113
bdamm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that there isn't even a term for this. You've hit a major point here.

Also, you rarely see people fretting over the low percentage of males going for primary education jobs. In many ways these jobs are just as or more important than computer programming, but nobody cares that it has such a lopsided gender ratio. Personally, I don't even care about it, but it makes me pause to consider why I have to be so concerned about the lack of women in CS. Am I being an asshole and trying to shove…

> you rarely see people fretting over the low percentage of males going for primary education jobs.

Perhaps not where you are. In the places where I have first hand knowledge (UK and Norway) people have been fretting over that for decades.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#146

Post by drspacemonkey »

klipt wrote: post #132
twobyfour wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution for my parents was to send me to an all-girls school with a feminist bent. That had its own drawbacks in plenty, but the upside was an upbringing relatively free of gender stereotypes. And talk to them about it. If they're hearing one thing from their friends and another at home, they will experience cognitive dissonance, and they will wonder about it, even if they don't know to ask about it. Edited to a…

Or it's just data driven marketing. "Research shows that sales and profits go up when we make girls' toys pink." "Okay then, make girls' toys pink!" Anyway, my guess is that whatever strategy would encourage the majority of women to go into programming isn't necessarily something women on hacker news would like, because women on hacker news are part of the self selected minority who already buck gender trends. You do…

That's effectively how Lego Friends came to be. LEGO wanted to expand their market to hit the same market segment as Barbie. After years of market research, focus-testing, and development, they released Friends. It quickly became the fastest-selling line in the company's history.

For reasons that I'm not even going to attempt to speculate upon, a non-trivial number of young girls really like that stuff. Pretending it's not true, or casting judgement on the morality of this won't change the fact that it's effective. If it helps spark children's creativity, imagination, and passion for building things, then that's great in my book.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#147

Post by creaghpatr »

didibus wrote: post #118
wccrawford wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until a few minutes ago, I'd never heard of "pinkifying", either. Here, I'll make one up that will be instantly recognizable: Masculinizing.

Yes, pinkifying is not a real term, but the truth is, I was trying to describe the stereotype and couldn't for boys. I thought girls stereotypes are they like pink, flowers, dresses, sparkles, dolls, etc. And then I chocked on boys, I wouldn't be able to go ahead and "masculinize" something, because I wouldn't know what that means. I'm thinking boys like fighting, to argue, the color blue or red, trucks, cars, heavy…

I think it's a useful term, for sake of discussion

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#148

Post by Steve_T_online »

stinkytaco wrote: post #45
kradeelav wrote: post #14

I honestly feel like framing the debate around surface elements like color (of all things) is worse than useless, and would rather people focus on what tech-y groups have historically attracted young girls with no problem - neopets(1), for example. (The linked article below focuses on a few things that really resonates with me - emotional security paired with the freedom to play and hack, not having to ~present~ a ge…

Some of the problem with this discussion is the fact that we talk about technology as an end in itself. We expect that people will get interested because they like tech for techs sake, not because they view tech as a means to some other end. It's possible to become interested in tech because you'd like to build things or make movies or program games. My daughter is really ambivalent to "engineering", but she'd very m…

The pursuit of knowledge in technology can be an end in itself. Very often there is another purpose, such as your daughter wanting to make movies, so the tech knowledge happens through that greater desire. However a (small) percentage of children in my classes will quite happily play with BIDMAS equations in Python for an entire hour-long lesson, and then come back at lunchtime to see how addition and subtraction are affected by parentheses. They come back just for the kick of seeing maths equations calculated in a coding language, and they are an equal mix of male and female.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#149

Post by Steve_T_online »

sthielen wrote: post #55

I think there is a balance to be found between "pinkifying" and "de-blueing" (to wrangle an inversion out of that word). Many of these early education coding platforms use "play" to introduce fundamentals and concepts to kids. They're not intended as formal platforms for computer science education; they want to let kids do cool things and get excited about programming and possibly ramp up into that more formal progra…

I teach Computing from Years 1 to 11, and amongst the Lower Primary school students (Years 1 to 4) I use Espresso quite a lot. The children love Espresso. It has a variety of characters, and the girls in my classes will happily select characters such as vampires, monsters, cars, trucks. Equally many of the boys will choose rainbows or flowers. The gender divide differences are much more obvious in Secondary, where the students are then feeling societal pressures to conform to certain stereotypes, either consciously or subconsciously.

Re: No need to pinkify – Girls get interested in tech because it is interesting

#150

Post by Steve_T_online »

EncipheredBy wrote: post #65

So, one thing that this article ignores is that kids pick up really strongly on what is expected of their gender. I think the "let's make programming more pink" thing is silly, BUT hey, isn't that what toy manufacturers and clothing manufacturers all do to signal "hey girls, this is for you!"? So if you slap a bunch of pink stuff on things, yeah, you're kind of making an invitation to them to join in. BUT I think tha…

Agreed, although in fact I have found that the younger children tend to be pretty gender-neutral in what interests them when coding. It is only really when they hit 9 or 10 and above that I have started to notice the girls favouring pink or flowery items more than the boys.
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