Hi Vidya,
I’m happy to see you prosper after Motorola. It seemed our console team had quite a few more engineering women than other teams within Motorola, just never enough. In my Marketing role, it seemed much easier to find highly motivated women to hire and I did exactly that.
You know the Brits seem to be doing better at teaching coding that we do in the US. They have been flooding grade school classrooms with Raspberry Pi boards and Unix to get all kids interested in coding, thus, investing in the future of the UK. MIT came up with Scratch, an object oriented graphical user interface for Unix and British kids are eating it up. https://scratch.mit.edu/ This leads them to the next step of learning Python programming. I used this training myself to learn some Unix programming in my retirement.
The Raspberry Pi foundation reports that more than 50% of the best coders are girls. An educator I communicated with in London told me that the most difficult part of keeping your girls motivated was to beatdown peer pressure from girls in their class who didn’t like it. She said that also went for mothers who didn’t see coding as a “Lady’s profession”. Well excuse me!! The Dad’s weren’t as big a problem. Sponsership of their daughter’s continuation with coding is pretty high. Maybe it’s the robots that you can build and program around a Raspberry Pi board. https://www.raspberrypi.org/
The object oriented approach of Scratch’s cartoon-like graphical user interface kept some of the more graphically oriented girls in coding. Especially when Python was added. Many of the girls have come up with vastly more viable games and addons that the boys. Raspberry Pi supports the distribution and sale of many of programs and that spurs continuing interest. They are working it like the Apple, Google and Microsoft apps and addons marketplaces.
The Brits believe that this generation of girls and boys are the key to their cyber-future. Take a look at this young lady’s super achievement. https://twitter.com/poppymosbacher .
By the way, Microsoft now supports a team supporting a development version of Windows for Raspberry Pi.
I wish you all of the best. Keep up your excellent and very important work. With so much of the future of the US and the world tied to the quality of computer programming, I want every single qualified person to be involved. For our own sakes, we cannot allow coding to be a gender-biased profession.
Just one guy’s perspective.
Pat Harrington
Retired Motorola Individual Contributor