Love this! The disparity in education isn’t that bad but in the workplace its shocking. I was at a tech conference yesterday and the queue for the mens toilet was out the door and down the hall, there was no queue for the womens.
I’m all for this, obviously – especially if the numbers of women is skewed and moving in the wrong direction.
I’m a dad of a boy, and have worked in the health care field – where males are often under represented. I do worry that the same kind of pressure isn’t applied in this direction. Not just to “even the tables” in some way, but because (like all equality issues) we all miss out when people who could do something choose not to because of gender stereotypes.
I guess this leads to the question of what the hell happened to the Michael Gove’s 2014 mandate for teaching coding to children (of both sexes) at primary school?
My two oldest leant the concepts of basic coding designing and building games using a thing called “[Scratch](https://scratch.mit.edu/)” and they built a web page using html mark-up during years 5 and 6. Very basic stuff but age appropriate. My two youngest have done absolutely nothing so far.
This is smart. These type of groups need to move into the present day. I was surprised at how much stayed the same in scouts and boys brigade despite not having attended since I was a kid 25 odd years ago.
That’s cool but the best thing about brownies/cubs was doing outdoorsy stuff
As long as the teaching is good this is great news. Not everyone has to love coding or STEM, however no one should have doors closed to them based on gender and assumed gender roles.
Why is coding the only career path people seem to care about evening out the gender split on? What about being a plumber / HGV driver / mechanic?
When I was at school we had a pretty even split at GCSE level for IT, at A level Computer Science there were 3 women in 14 and at university there were 2 in a year of 150. They likely had a similar representation in the workplace, maybe 1 in 100. For quite a while industry has been saying its toxic environments and I while I do agree many workplaces are awful to their staff the ladies never get into the job market at all, they just disappear through the education levels. That was my experience which seems to be something that is mirrored for colleagues.
I doubt Brownies can undo that. We seem to have a lot of jobs that are gendered and we ought to understand where its coming from, not just in coding, men have been driven out of teaching quite hard of the past decades and are slowly gradually returning to nursing. We have a cultural split too and the nerdy programmer image hasn’t helped sell the role. We ought to be driving as a society to understand the lack of equality and where its coming from.
I’m very glad to see the uptick in people caring about boys’ educations and careers which only seems to happen any time there is something mentioning women
Pushing everyone towards IT or coding roles is not a solution. You have to be passionate about it or deeply interested otherwise the job is hell.
I’ve worked with people who done Software Engineering because the “money is good” and they hated their lives. Tech is quite a niche field, can be very stressful and you have to be committed to learning constantly and not be uncomfortable with change. I’m not saying women aren’t capable of this, most of the women I work with in Software Engineering are great, just like their male colleagues. I haven’t seen any evidence that women can’t “do” the job. They just seem, by and large, to be not very interested in it…
This is a load of bullshit behind the guise of “equality” or whatever else. Nobody cares the beauty industry is dominated by women, because everyone accepts the vast majority of men just aren’t interested in it, why can the reverse not be accepted when it comes to Technology?
When it comes to going to university to study a topic at an advanced level, nobody dictates this to you. You are free to make a choice on what to study, providing you have the prerequisite qualifications. Nobody I know was pushed into this by parents or society either, I certainly wasn’t. I studied it and pursued a career in it because I was very interested. Most of the people I work with genuinely live for this stuff, male or female.
Most universities and companies have “women in tech initiatives” and have done for a fair few years, yet there’s still a lack of women applying for roles and you can’t force people to either.
I’m an Engineering Manager at a very reputable software company and I’m currently hiring, out of 9 applicants for a role I have one female applicant.
I do agree though that all kids should be taught basic computing, software, hardware and IT in general with the way the world is going.
But I’m just starting to get really annoyed with this whole debate, it’s constant.
If you are interested in technology, pursue it, regardless of your gender, it’s literally that fucking simple.
Brownies and scouts is supposed to be fun ‘after school’ activities. Not more school, I don’t like this.
So learning how to Google and copy/paste from Stackoverflow?
I don’t get this thing of trying to force girls into programming. Like most programmers I started dabbling in it myself, completely self taught, before getting more formal education. If someone wants to go into programming then they will naturally start to follow that path, but I don’t get why people are trying to forcefully make more women enter the programming community. By all means encourage all kids who show an interest to get involved, but leave it there. Noone is trying to teach boys how to get into HR (which is predominately women dominated) for example.
I had so much exposure to computer systems in primary school on the tail end of micro-BBC era by the time I was in secondry school is was just EXCEL and other basic GUI stuff.
14 comments
Love this! The disparity in education isn’t that bad but in the workplace its shocking. I was at a tech conference yesterday and the queue for the mens toilet was out the door and down the hall, there was no queue for the womens.
I’m all for this, obviously – especially if the numbers of women is skewed and moving in the wrong direction.
I’m a dad of a boy, and have worked in the health care field – where males are often under represented. I do worry that the same kind of pressure isn’t applied in this direction. Not just to “even the tables” in some way, but because (like all equality issues) we all miss out when people who could do something choose not to because of gender stereotypes.
I guess this leads to the question of what the hell happened to the Michael Gove’s 2014 mandate for teaching coding to children (of both sexes) at primary school?
My two oldest leant the concepts of basic coding designing and building games using a thing called “[Scratch](https://scratch.mit.edu/)” and they built a web page using html mark-up during years 5 and 6. Very basic stuff but age appropriate. My two youngest have done absolutely nothing so far.
This is smart. These type of groups need to move into the present day. I was surprised at how much stayed the same in scouts and boys brigade despite not having attended since I was a kid 25 odd years ago.
That’s cool but the best thing about brownies/cubs was doing outdoorsy stuff
As long as the teaching is good this is great news. Not everyone has to love coding or STEM, however no one should have doors closed to them based on gender and assumed gender roles.
Why is coding the only career path people seem to care about evening out the gender split on? What about being a plumber / HGV driver / mechanic?
When I was at school we had a pretty even split at GCSE level for IT, at A level Computer Science there were 3 women in 14 and at university there were 2 in a year of 150. They likely had a similar representation in the workplace, maybe 1 in 100. For quite a while industry has been saying its toxic environments and I while I do agree many workplaces are awful to their staff the ladies never get into the job market at all, they just disappear through the education levels. That was my experience which seems to be something that is mirrored for colleagues.
I doubt Brownies can undo that. We seem to have a lot of jobs that are gendered and we ought to understand where its coming from, not just in coding, men have been driven out of teaching quite hard of the past decades and are slowly gradually returning to nursing. We have a cultural split too and the nerdy programmer image hasn’t helped sell the role. We ought to be driving as a society to understand the lack of equality and where its coming from.
I’m very glad to see the uptick in people caring about boys’ educations and careers which only seems to happen any time there is something mentioning women
Pushing everyone towards IT or coding roles is not a solution. You have to be passionate about it or deeply interested otherwise the job is hell.
I’ve worked with people who done Software Engineering because the “money is good” and they hated their lives. Tech is quite a niche field, can be very stressful and you have to be committed to learning constantly and not be uncomfortable with change. I’m not saying women aren’t capable of this, most of the women I work with in Software Engineering are great, just like their male colleagues. I haven’t seen any evidence that women can’t “do” the job. They just seem, by and large, to be not very interested in it…
This is a load of bullshit behind the guise of “equality” or whatever else. Nobody cares the beauty industry is dominated by women, because everyone accepts the vast majority of men just aren’t interested in it, why can the reverse not be accepted when it comes to Technology?
When it comes to going to university to study a topic at an advanced level, nobody dictates this to you. You are free to make a choice on what to study, providing you have the prerequisite qualifications. Nobody I know was pushed into this by parents or society either, I certainly wasn’t. I studied it and pursued a career in it because I was very interested. Most of the people I work with genuinely live for this stuff, male or female.
Most universities and companies have “women in tech initiatives” and have done for a fair few years, yet there’s still a lack of women applying for roles and you can’t force people to either.
I’m an Engineering Manager at a very reputable software company and I’m currently hiring, out of 9 applicants for a role I have one female applicant.
I do agree though that all kids should be taught basic computing, software, hardware and IT in general with the way the world is going.
But I’m just starting to get really annoyed with this whole debate, it’s constant.
If you are interested in technology, pursue it, regardless of your gender, it’s literally that fucking simple.
Brownies and scouts is supposed to be fun ‘after school’ activities. Not more school, I don’t like this.
So learning how to Google and copy/paste from Stackoverflow?
I don’t get this thing of trying to force girls into programming. Like most programmers I started dabbling in it myself, completely self taught, before getting more formal education. If someone wants to go into programming then they will naturally start to follow that path, but I don’t get why people are trying to forcefully make more women enter the programming community. By all means encourage all kids who show an interest to get involved, but leave it there. Noone is trying to teach boys how to get into HR (which is predominately women dominated) for example.
I had so much exposure to computer systems in primary school on the tail end of micro-BBC era by the time I was in secondry school is was just EXCEL and other basic GUI stuff.