* Posts by compTeach

1 publicly visible post • joined 4 Oct 2019

The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

compTeach

One of the problems stems from the school years. I have taught in a number of co-ed schools and despite best efforts of some excellent teachers, getting 'girls' to take an interest in computing is challenging to say the least. Almost always we recruited a significant number of boys and one or two girls.

When queried why they weren't interested, it was usually one of two reasons. My friends aren't doing it, and for those who were able to break the strong bond of peer pressure, there are too many boys on the course. There is also some interesting research (which annoyingly I can't remember where I saw it) which indicates that at school age, boys are more interested in the logical side of education (engineering, physics etc) and girls are more interested in the social angle (e.g. geography, history). Though a bit of a generalisation, it did tend to be broadly true in my experience.

Interestingly when we did manage to get a girl to take computing, they were usually much better than their male peers.