My First STEMettes Hackathon
This weekend, STEMettes organised a hackathon for girls in Manchester. Dozens of girls came along to spend the weekend using the basic principles of coding to make games and animations. There’s a full write-up here on the STEMettes’ website, including a sample of one of the animations.
I confess I only turned up at the end of the event to be one of the judges and hand out some prizes, whereas some of my @LateRooms colleagues were there all weekend helping the girls out, so massive respect to them for giving up their time. From what they’ve told me, they really enjoyed themselves — and it really is a pleasure to see young minds getting excited about using their talents to create cool stuff.
It was certainly a treat for me to spend the day in the company of a lot of girls doing tech, given that most of the time (in my daily job as a software engineer), I’m in the minority as a woman.
So how come there are so few women working in technical positions within IT? Don’t girls have the same opportunities as boys these days? If there are fewer women in IT, doesn’t that mean girls just don’t like that kind of thing? Or maybe they’re just not as good as boys at tech?
And that’s what makes the difference. That idea, right there. Of course girls can do IT, but there’s still a wide belief that girls aren’t as good as boys at logical problem solving. The problem is not that girls are less good at these things, or even that they’re less interested — it’s that people think they are.
One of the many amazing things about the human brain is how easy it is to influence. If someone tells you they expect you to be bad at something, it makes you more likely to be bad at it. Nobody likes to believe they’re that gullible, but we all are.
Here’s an interesting piece of research*: Some school students were asked questions about whether girls might be better at the arts, and boys better at maths. After that, they were asked what scores they got in some exams they did two years earlier. Another group of pupils was just asked what their exam scores were, without being asked what they thought about boys being better at maths.
The first group remembered their scores wrong. The girls thought they did worse in the sciences, and the boys thought they did worse in the arts. The other group got their scores right. So, just because they had been thinking about the idea that girls might not be good at maths, they remembered themselves at being worse at maths than they really were. They subtracted on average an extra 3% from their scores.
This was just one small study. Girls are surrounded by these ideas all the time. It’s uncomfortable to think we might get worse at something just because someone plants the thought in our head. But the fantastic thing is, if someone tells you you’re going to be great at it, that makes a difference too.
There’s a lot of really bad science out there about the difference between boys’ and girls’ brains. Scientists have done scans that show our brains look different — and supposedly the boys have larger areas in their brains for things like complex problem solving. What makes me really sad is that some people have even redesigned boys’ and girls’ education to try and take account of this. But there’s a VERY important piece missing from this puzzle, and it’s something the decent scientists will also tell you about: Those areas of our brains grow and shrink according to what we do. So, if you believe you will be bad at science, if you don’t learn much science, that part of your brain will shrink. Not because you are a girl, just because you’re not exercising it. You can change your own brain.
Girls are just as good as boys at science and maths and IT. Girls are just as likely as boys to get excited about solving puzzles and making websites and games and animations. Girls can do brilliant stuff too. The Stemettes hackathon was a fantastic event — which is why I want to shout it from the rooftops, and get those girls doing more more more. Because they really can, and don’t let anyone tell them different.
Three of the winners will be coming to @LateRooms to spend a day finding out what it’s like to be a software engineer, and they’re already really excited about it — I look forward to showing them how enjoyable it can be.
*Chatard, Guimond and Selimbegovic, 2007 — via Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine
