#techgirlday

The UN has set aside October 11, 2012 as the first-ever International Day of the Girl. Their goal is to recognize that empowerment of and investment in girls is critical for economic growth, the eradication of poverty, meaningful participation of girls in decisions that affect them and breaking the cycle of discrimination and violence. This day provides focus to efforts that are helping girls gain “the active support and engagement of their parents, legal guardians, families and care providers, as well as boys and men and the wider community.”

What's the problem?

There are a litany of issues facing girls worldwide including illiteracy, school dropout, forced marriage, violence and media misrepresentation. These are not new problems, but are issues rooted in systems of inequality that have been around for a long time. There are overwhelming stats that can never fully convey the heart-breaking realities they reveal. I could share some of these little bullet points of information that would temporarily piece your heart, but we've got bullet-proof brains. Our ancient lizard brain tags this unpleasant information as fearsome or dangerous and then our natural instinct of flight or fight kicks in. This information can actually stop us in our tracks, especially if we feel there's nothing we can do directly to take action. So if we're serious about addressing these issues, where do we start? 

Alternate realities

I like to focus on alternate realities. Eve Ensler has a vision that I love - what would things be like "if teenage girls wake up, if teenage girls take it back, this whole world will change overnight because they have more energy, more brilliance, more gut-filled, open-hearted wisdom”. I heard about many alternate realities at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing this past week. The conference experience itself was an alternate reality with 3,600 tech women gathered together under one roof to share their knowledge and experiences. This conferenced also confirmed for me that one very important way to empower girls to imagine and achieve new futures for themselves is by providing them with solid foundational knowledge of computer science concepts and inspiring them to share their vision with the globally connected community.

Change the world

If the problems are so overwhelming, how is one day going to make a difference? As John Mayer sings "Is there anyone who really recalls, ever breaking rank at all for something someone yelled real loud one time." To me this first International Day of the Girl is planting a flag, taking stock of where we are and where we want to be. It is a milestone that we can look back on and measure progress. We know there are problems. We know there are alternate realities we want to be part of. It is time to move from advocacy to action - to show how to do the things that will empower girls. I am acting through Day of the "Tech" Girl and if tech is your thing too, I hope you will join in! If not tech, please find some way to empower and invest in girls so they can become the change we all need to see in the world!

10x10. Educate girls, change the world

Day of the Girl

Day of the "Tech" Girl

From advocacy to action. In the previous session I attended at #ghc12, Are we there yet: education & innovation for women & girls?, I heard a clarion call for moving from advocacy to action. In this session, Barbara Ericson, newly minted A. Richard Newton Educator award winner, answers the question - how? First, I think it is interesting that she is a women who did not start out in education, but comes from industry. She also didn't start out to pursue computing as a career, horses and therefore becoming a veterinarian was her passion. As with many women of my generation, she stumbled unto computer science in college and she also remembers that in the "early days" it was not such a male-dominated field. Somewhere along her journey, she became passionate about addressing the gender equity issues that arose. Barbara is a great role model for the rest of us that are also passionate about this issue and want to take action. These are some "how to" lessons I learned from her:

Initiate

Start somewhere. You don't have to start on a grand scale. Find a problem locally and begin addressing it. In 2004, Barbara became the CS Outreach Director at Georgia Tech. This did give her a larger platform than some of us might have to initiate change, but you still have to start somewhere. At that time in Georgia, there were many issues to address: the computing classes in high school were widely disparate in what they actually covered, only 44 of 400 high schools offered AP CS and the AP CS exam was transitioning from C++ to Javascript. Through the Institute for Computing Education, Barbara helped tackle the AP CS transition by educating teachers and that same year they offered 2 sessions of summer camp to expose high school students to computing. By 2012, over 470 teachers have been through the ICE program and that same year there were 78 sessions of summer camp for 4th thru 12th graders offered at 12 different sites throughout Georgia.

Collaborate

Don't try to fix things on your own. Barbara worked with other partners like Georgia Tech and Georgia's DoE to help them recognize the problem with computing courses in the high schools and even their own undergraduate courses. She worked with CSTA to help redefine the CS curriculum in Georgia high schools and the NSF to gain funding for Georgia Computes! to train teachers and expose more students to computing concepts. Obviously, the funding is especially critical to help bring others on board and many of us are not in a position to write an NSF grant. However, there are lots of local opportunities for finding grants and these organizations and individuals can become valuable collaborators.

Iterate

Try something out, learn from it, modify as needed and try again. A few things Barbara has learned from her summer workshops:

4th & 5th grade is the sweet spot for summer camps because parents are looking for childcare & this is where their camps make enough money to pay for middle and high school camps

high school is the most difficult age to attract, because at that age are self-sufficient and have many other options

don't offer the camp for free, it won't be taken seriously - offer scholarships with a reduced rate to cover food & materials

professor are expensive - have teachers run the camp 

have high school & undergrad students teach - they are great role models & it keeps them in the pipeline

kids are much more interested in communication than calculation

competitions are a way to get teachers interested in working with tools and concepts you want them to teach

getting girls to attend camp is still the most challenging part, work with existing youth organizations to reach more girls and minorities

it is best to work with organizations that are organized because they will do better at collecting the data you need to iterate successfully

Persist

There are forces that stubbornly resist change to the status quo. In Barbara's example, she had fought for AP CS to be counted as a science credit in high school. Georgia is one of only a handful of states where AP CS counts as any sort of credit, so it is a big deal because it provides a needed incentive for students to take the course. Somewhere along the way, AP CS was dropped from the science list and Barbara was there to ensure it got back in. Also, having created a replicable and sustainable model for sharing computing with teachers and students, she has broadened her sights beyond Georgia with a new NSF grant, Expanding Computing Education Pathways, that will work to bring these programs to other states.

Let’s hear it for the girl! That’s the modified refrain running in my head from this excellent #ghc12 session. The panel shared their highlights of reaching African American girls through summer camp experiences. Barbara Ericson (Georgia Tech) shared the experience of Georgia Computes, a program started in 2006 with an NSF grant with the goals of increasing quantity and quality of CS teachers & students especially focused on women & minorities. Some cool ideas she shared:

4th and 5th grade are sweet spot for well-attended summer camps as parents looking for opportunities for their kids

They host a lending library of robotics, picoboards, XO laptops, smartphones that local educators can use to checkout tech tools for their entire class to use.

They have started targeting letters to students who do well on PSAT, with a message like - you did so well, you should consider studying CS. This has the added benefit of getting parents to think about this as an option and advocate for AP CS in school for their kids. 

She hires local Aspiration in Computing Award Winners to help ensure they stay in the pipeline.

Dr. Jakita Thomas (Spelman College) created the ICIS summer camps for African American middle and high school girls. They are 1 week computer camps & her take aways from the summer camp experience:

African American girls tend to design and create culturally/socially relevant games/apps/robots. For example, Good Hair for Sure app to help women to identify products appropriate for their hair type.

The shift from producer to consumer is a paradigm shift necessary to engagement in CS. Move from passive engagement with CS to active engagement. Requires follow-up to link tech with entrepreneurship.

Seeing people who look like them is critical self-perception.

Dr. Quincy Brown (Director of Girls Who Will) added a girls camp to an existing boys camp 2 years ago. She was an electrical engineer for 10 years, but didn’t really make the connection that she was one of only a handful of African American engineers she would encounter during her career. Once she had 2 daughters, she began thinking about opportunities for them. Girls Who Will does not advertise as African-American, but winds up being 95%. Her take aways from the summer camp experience:

Focus on tech innovation & making stuff, don’t get bogged down in terminology. 

Girls don’t naturally think of themselves as tinkerers, but they may just lack experiences.

Students are passionate about helping the next generation. 

Have the girls journal everyday and turn into word clouds to use on their certificates (a form of self-badging).

How are we going to hear from more girls in computing? Here are some ideas from the Q&A:

Help girls connect what they already think they want to do in the future with computer science. You can attach CS to pretty much anything.

Provide girls and their parents with knowledge about the pathways to college and computer science.

Girls need to see themselves in computing, so they need to see female students, female professors, females in industry.

Girls want to be social and creative. Show them how they do that with computer science.

When you start talking stereotypes, you are actually reinforcing it - counter it instead.

Put male and female students on more even footing in AP CS by introducing with a tool like Alice.

It is about exposure. They may or may not have access to computers and tools at home or even in their school.

Holding programs on campus is very important. Being on the campus everyday, opens up their eyes and the idea that they can exist on campus. - Remind girls it’s about knowing what they like, not what other people think.

Are we willing to face our fears? Besides a session at #ghc12 packed with inspiration and food for thought, I felt the under-current was about us all facing our fears. Dr. Manuel Pérez-Quiñones (Virginia Tech) started the panel by addressing reverse discrimination. This is really the fear of the majority, that programs and awards targeting the underrepresented somehow takes away from the represented. This fear is revealed in statements like, “you have it so easy because you are a women” or “when are we going to offer a whites only …”. He also pointed out that different groups come with different cultural backgrounds and therefore different needs. Of course, most of the existing programs address the needs of the majority. Dr. Mary Lou Soffa (University of Virginia) spoke about how things are going in the computing pipeline. There has been shrinkage from middle school up through PhD. However, there are successful programs and strategies to help reverse this trend. She is involved with Tapestry, which targets middle & high school teachers by demonstrating effective practices for teaching CS, introducing recruiting strategies, provide materials to use in CS courses. They also offer 3 levels of intro CS at UVa (expert, some experience & novice) and the novice course which has more women and minorities than the others is also actually converting more women & minorities to pursue CS degrees.

Dr. Maria Klawe (Harvey Mudd College) spoke about the imposter syndrome, which is all about the fears we carry around with us. They may change over time, but we are never immune to feeling inadequate, unworthy or scared. She suggests 3 steps for dealing with the imposter syndrome. 1) Admit it and you will stop feeling like an idiot, don’t let it stop you from doing something you are uncomfortable. 2) Practice doing things you are uncomfortable with, it gets easier. 3) Build a mentoring network, one of the best ways to feel better about yourself is by helping other people, include all levels of relationships in network.

Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, III (University of Maryland) spoke about the culture of STEM courses and how they are much more prone to pit students against each other (eg. grading on a curve) than encouraging collaboration. Only 20% of women & minorities who start a STEM degree finish it. But the stats are not that much better for others: 32% for whites & 42% for asians. He says that “culture has everything to do with the questions we ask and the questions we don’t ask.”

The other big ideas from the session (and for facing our fears):

When you target a group, don’t exclude others. When you include the majority, then they can become your advocates and mentors.

Building community among people is very important, we need many more efforts where people can trust each other.

Mentoring has been proven effective in expanding the pipeline and institutions of higher learning need to set clear expectations for their departments about mentoring.

If there aren’t things happening in computing in K12, then there won’t be things happening later.

In science you will get more rejections than acceptances. It isn’t personal, it’s all about the questioning behind science. Play games & learn to lose. Have a mentor provide a reality check.

The first ever International Day of the Girl is October 11. Geek Gurl Diaries and Teen Tech Girls are collecting interviews & stories as well as "how to" videos from inspirational women in IT, teachers, students and girls in tech.  

Tech girls really need to see that there are female role models and potential mentors in computing that are passionate about their careers. Please consider sharing your story or latest tech advice:

DM @geekgurldiaries to find out when the next Google+ Hangout is.

I'm very excited to announce the launch of the Day of the "Tech" Girl website. It is a resource for folks interested in hosting and participating in tech-related activities and events on October 11, the first ever International Day of the Girl. I also see it as a resource for collecting, sharing and collaborating on gender equity issues in computing throughout the year. There are many collaborators and supporters to thank and many can be found on the about page.