The White House recently appointed Megan Smith of
So, it’s hard to make a case that women are not represented in technology, jokes Jocelyn Goldfein, former director of Engineering at Facebook.
Yet, there is clearly a shortage of women in technology companies. This summer, Google and Facebook reported how many female (technical) employees they have on staff: 17 percent and 15 percent. Before we start blaming Silicon Valley for not hiring more women, consider this: only 18 percent of women graduate with a computer science degree in the US. If the talent pool is so slim, then how will companies be able to hire more female engineers?
A new documentary, set to debut in early 2015, looks at the gender
The answer lies in education. "The computer science department does not have a gate in front of it, saying Keep Out Girls," Goldfein says. While women dominate the biological sciences, they stray away from computing.
In fact, the job opportunities are far greater in computer sciences. The White House released a study, estimating that there will be 1.4 million jobs in the computing industries by 2020. Yet, at the current rate, only 3 percent of women will have those gigs.
If more women are graduating from college than men, and are dominating fields like math and biology, then why are they deviating from technology?
“This is a pipeline problem,” Goldfein says. “In fact, each stage of the pipeline is broken.”
Girls are turned off by coding and computer science by the time they get to college.
“However, I don’t think that tech is any more sexist than other industries or an all Boys Club,” she says.
Yet, women do dress less feminine to fit in at work. It’s a mental block: When you think of an engineer, what pops into your head, she asks. Reynolds refers to it as the boy-nerd-genius stereotype that’s become ingrained in our culture. (In 1983, there were over 35% female computer science majors in college. Since the mid-80s, that percentage has steadily declined. Some experts correlate that with marketing of home computers to solely men, not women.)
To fix the pipeline could mean going as far back as preschool and kindergarden where boys are introduced to building blocks or legos. Such small behavioral and psychological hints dictate what society considers a norm. Organizations such as Girls Who Code or GoldieBlox are aspiring to change that by making code and technology more female-friendly.
Only 18 percent of computer science graduates are women in America, which translates into a... [+]
It boils down to how far back can you go? But, there are key inflection points, according to Golfdein, where the educational system could start making some changes. For instance, if girls are shown in middle school how to code, and know the basics, they’re less likely to feel intimidated when they get to college and walk into a computer science class.
Danielle Feinberg is an example. The head of photography and lighting at Pixar, Feinberg, graduated with a computer science degree from Harvard. A year later, she joined Pixar as a 22-year-old college graduate and hasn’t left since.
In grade school, Feinberg was the only girl on the math team. “It was intimidating a bit, but I loved math.” More importantly, she had a math teacher who instilled a love of math in the students, she says. That was followed by a female teacher in the 5th grade who taught the students how to code. “So things were less segregated,” she says.
She reached junior high and realized that grade school may have been a utopia. But at that point, it was too late. Feinberg was hooked.
“By the time I got to junior high, it didn’t really matter to me anymore because I had fallen in love with math, science, and programming. It [the stereotype] became more of an annoyance more than anything,” she recalls.
At Pixar, Feinberg moved up quickly and was managing teams of men, often times older than her. Likewise, Goldfein was in a managerial role at Facebook before she decided to step away and become an angel investor.
Filmmaker Robin Hauser Reynolds at work, interviewing. Photo Courtesy of Code.
That’s why Reynolds decided to feature these women in her documentary. Though part of the solution is amending the educational system to include more programming at at a younger age, the other half is getting female technologists to become role models for younger girls.
Given the dearth of female engineers, just simply seeing women in computer science is helpful, all three note. A basic, but much needed step to rectifying the gender gap.
