How Computer Science Has Failed Girls, And How We Can Fix It
Growing up, I never thought of computer programming as something for me. It seemed hard, boring, and something for boys or lonely introverts. I was neither. I liked to play dress-up and run around outside in the creek behind my house. The neighborhood kids and I would pretend that we were runaways forced to make our own civilization in the woods without parents or society. It was awesome. As a kid, my friends and I were creative, social and deeply connected to one another. I never made the leap that this sort of social interaction and creativity could be accomplished through technology.
I had a computer and played Oregon Trail at school and Carmen Sandiego on my computer at home. By middle school, a few friends had the internet at their home computers and we would stay up late at chat with strangers and pretend we were adults, (which is horrifying to think about now) but it was fun! I never really thought too much about how the technology worked or what the possibilities of the internet could be.
By the time I got to college, adults were telling me to learn “computers” because that’s where all of the jobs would be. Being an undeclared liberal arts student, I heeded this advice and enrolled in Intro to Computer Science my first semester. The first two days I was on board. Learning the basics of a computer and the internet, etc., was really interesting. Then on the third day, things took a turn. I didn’t understand anything. But it seemed like everyone else did. It seemed like the (mostly male) rest of the class knew how to ask the right questions and did not appear to be confused in any way. I felt dumb. I was totally lost all of the sudden and I felt like the only one. I felt out of my element and totally insecure. I had never felt this in any of my other classes. I was afraid to raise my hand because I didn’t want to ask a stupid question and reveal my dumbness to the entire class. So I dropped the course.
I didn’t think about programming again in any real way until 2008 when I was in my late 20s, working as a television editor, and had an idea for a tech startup. I was in a dressing room trying on clothes and wanted a way to take a survey if I should get the outfit. Kind of like an ask the audience poll in “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” By this point, I had a few friends in the tech startup world in New York City, so I asked one of them if this was something that existed or that could be built. Turns out it didn’t and it could. Thus began my journey on building my first tech startup. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I eventually learned the ropes and was able to hire a team, raise money, build a product, attract users. It was an uphill battle. Trying to interview potential CTO candidates to build a tech product when you don’t even have a clue what front-end and back-end is, is almost impossible. I had a lot of help, of course, but it was frustrating. I didn’t speak the language. I could express what I wanted. I was out of my league and it fueled my insecurity. Why didn’t I know this stuff!? Why didn’t I realize that this was the stuff I should be learning, these were the skills that could fuel my creativity and help me realize my dreams! I had a college degree, the thing that everyone said I would need to succeed in the world, but I had never felt so ill-equipped.
Fast forward a couple of years, I’ve now been working in the tech industry for 6 or so years, and beginning to feel like I actually have a clue what’s going on. I was having lunch with Sara Chipps, founder of Girl DevelopIt, and one of my early friends and employees in when I was launching that first company. She was telling me about an idea she had about a wearable that got girls excited about programming. I was floored. I imagined that if something like this existed when I was a kid, I would have loved it. If there was something that was for me, explicitly for girls who like jewelry, like communicating with their friends, liked being creative- I would have loved it. I know now as an adult how cool and powerful learning technology is, but as a kid I had no idea. But if I made the logical connection between learning to program and creating things, and communicating with my friends, I would have been on board 100%.
I decided to join Sara in making this wearable, a programmable bracelet called Jewelbots, that aims to get girls excited about coding. I feel so excited that every day I get to wake up and work on this inspiring product. Sara and I are aligned in our desire to get girls excited about programming. We are bringing our different backgrounds to this goal, Sara as a programmer, and me as a wannabe programmer, to create better options for the next generation. Options we wish we had. Our motivation comes from the fact that we too, were girls not that long ago, and we have a clue what being a girl is like.
Every now and then we get feedback, usually from a guy on twitter, and yes, it is almost always a guy, saying that what we are doing is sexist, trying to make tech “girlie” and how offended they are by this. We always laugh, what could possibly be the issue here? At first we assumed that they were all just trolling, but then we began to see, they genuinely don’t get it. They actually think that making something that is unequivocally for girls is demeaning to them. They think that they shouldn’t have to have something marketed towards them, that coding is cool enough on its own, and we shouldn’t “push gender stereotypes” on them.
While I think it may be coming from a good place, they just don’t see the irony of mansplaining to a couple of women who are making a product for their younger selves, that what they are doing is invalid. The cold hard truth is, right now girls aren’t choosing to go into programming. So we, as women who were once girls, are taking our own life experiences along with months of research from actual girls and trying to do something about it. Yes, not every single girl wears jewelry, but many do. It’s great that there are little girls out there who are into tech and don’t care about gender norms. But for every tomboy who is already tinkering with electronics, there are many more girls going to slumber parties, attending ballet class, dressing up like Elsa, and they deserve to have their lives enriched by technology just as much as anyone else. There’s nothing wrong with all of that stuff and there’s nothing wrong with being “girlie.” Why can’t tech be girlie too?
PS if you are so inclined, please support the Jewelbots Kickstarter!
