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How to attract girls to the tech industry

bbc.co.uk

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: How to attract girls to the tech industry

#21
WOW, this article is bullshit after bullshit.

For example, Ada Lovelace coding in a time when few mem did... That is obvious, she was the first programmer, by definition she did before anyone else (male or female).

Or saying that Brazil has lots of female programmers and people assume that women in suits are in IT... That one is beyond wrong.

If you see a woman in suit (common where I live, that is São Paulo), their most likely job (beside being a secretary) is being a lawyer (we have a obscene amount of lawyers anyway).

Every day I cross by lots of female lawyers, had lawyer GFs, have lots of lawyer female friends...

Now the average woman dislike IT, not because it is a thing of men, when I am talking about IT wit ha friend for example and a women is bothered by it (happened a couple times), or impressed by it (also happened a couple times), what they say to me is that IT deals with machines and that is too complicated. (when I was younger I tried to teach them and whatnot, and I became sad when they just said it was complicated and refused to learn, now I see is that they don't want to bother).

I DID met some women working at IT, including had female co-workers... One interesting thing on them was that most were doing it for the money, because IT is well paid, women that suck at lawyering or other humananities end joining IT instead. I've met one women in IT that was in IT because she truly wanted to, her husband was a engineer, and she decided to have the same career as him, and work in IT as a hobby (she was very clear to our boss, that if work got in the way of taking care of her children she would quit because her husband money was enough... this was when the boss started to demand excessive overtime after badly created schedules)

Also by the way, when someone DO act sexist, is usually, women against women.

I have a degree in Game Design, on my campus there was also a course in Fashion Business (and several other design courses, and architecture).

My class had zero females. The other class in my year had one, that quickly became infamous (because she openly exchanged sex for people doing homework for her, specially with dumb guys, then she PROMISED sex, had the guy do the homework, and then dumped him)

Yet, several women became friends with us, and thought of moving to our course (some actually did), and people that joined after my year also had a bunch of women (I think the record was 25%)

Those women (that were officially in our course, or were friends and hanged out with us) were frequently attacked by women in other courses.

Most common attacks: "You are fat and ugly and want to hang out with nerds and otakus to have sex" (this was the most common, easily) "You are ugly and this is why you cannot work with fashion" (this came from fashion business students) "You are not a woman, you want to be a boy" "You are poor, not good enough for us" (Fashion Design students usually drove to university with Audi, Mercedes, etc... that in Brazil are crazy expensive, reaching in the six figures easily, Game Design students usually went walking or using bus, and most struggled to pay the tuition, sometimes you would recognize a fashion student on the bus stop, and frequently their reaction was to get instantly deep red and hide behind other people...)

After university, I kept seeing this same sort of behavior. (ie: other women attack IT women for not being lawyer, or medic, or PR...) although not as much as they attack full-time mothers (or those that state they want to drop their careers to become full-time mothers).

Re: How to attract girls to the tech industry

#23
I'm a woman and a programmer. I don't know why they aren't more female programmers. Going through school up through high school, I always had the impression that of my fellow classmates, the girls were the best in class. Pre-calculus was the highest math course my dinky high school offered, and there were a couple girls in there with me out of maybe eight students total. It was only when I came to college that I started seeing way more men in my CS and math classes, and lost the impression that guys were just apathetic about school. The only girls in my classes were Indian or Asian, and there weren't many of them. One other white girl I knew told me she went into CS because she thought that was the right field for becoming a secretary. I've never had problems with guys harassing me because of my interests or jobs, for which I suppose I'm fortunate. I wish I knew why there were so few women in my college CS classes, and why I rarely meet other female programmers in my town now.

Re: How to attract girls to the tech industry

#24
Incredible, that article seems to get by without blaming men at all. Did I miss something?

In another note, the whole A-levels system seems rather stupid to me. I've met several people in the UK who weren't able to study what they want because they had the wrong A-levels.

I guess ultimately it is questionable in general to deny people the possibility to study what they want. Why require some silly school certificate?

Re: How to attract girls to the tech industry

#30
Lets attract girls to construction and building jobs, and attract men to nursing and child care jobs as well. What can we do about that?

These issues go hand in hand, they are the same.

In my opinion it is bad taste to focus only on the tech industry. Go all in or go home.

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