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EdSurge
Girls Who Code Goes to Capitol Hill: Can Congress Help Solve the Gender Gap in Tech?
By Emily Tate
Jul 11, 2019
Jacky Rosen, a former computer programmer and the current junior U.S.
Senator from Nevada, says she “got into computers a little bit by
accident.”
It was the late 1970s, and Rosen was pursuing a degree in psychology at
the University of Minnesota. She was working on a research project, and
her advisor suggested she take her data down to the math department and
“tell them what you want—the guys will make you a program.”
Rosen did, and after being with those guys in the math department, she
realized that, next time, she wanted to be able to do it herself. “I
wanted to make these reports,” she told a room full of girls and women
in tech on Wednesday at an event in Washington, D.C. “I wanted to do
these things.”
So that’s what she learned to do. After finishing her undergraduate
degree, Rosen later returned to school and earned an associate degree
in computing and information technology, going on to work as a
programmer and software developer for companies including Summa
Corporation, Citibank and Southwest Gas.
“There weren’t very many women” in the field back then, she said, “and there still aren’t enough.”
But Rosen, sitting alongside Sen. Shelley Moore Capito from West
Virginia and Rep. Ayanna Pressley from Massachusetts, encouraged the
nearly 100 middle school, high school and college-aged girls in the
audience to keep at it anyway, adding that “computers are creative,
they’re dynamic, they’re detail-oriented”—just like them.
Rosen and about a dozen of her female colleagues in Congress, including
Reps. Sharice Davids from Kansas and Rashida Tlaib from Michigan,
attended the event on Capitol Hill Wednesday hosted by Girls Who Code
to discuss policy solutions that could help close the gender gap in
technology.
As part of that, Girls Who Code founder and CEO Reshma Saujani
announced that the organization has been working with Rosen’s team to
draft what she called the “first-ever federal Girls Who Code
legislation to encourage states to start reporting on their gender
diversity data.” The nonprofit has successfully promoted and helped
pass laws that track gender diversity in computing in two states so far
this year—first in Washington, then in Colorado—but this was the first
mention that it would be headed for the federal level. Girls Who Code
did not provide a timeline on when the bill would be introduced.
The legislation is an important component in closing the gender gap,
Saujani said, because current efforts to expand computer science
education—33 states have passed legislation in the last five years—are
having either no impact or a negative impact on girls’ participation in
computer science. It’s a trend the nonprofit examines in a new report,
“The State of Girls in K-12 Computer Science Classrooms,” that was
released in conjunction with Wednesday’s gathering.
“You can’t just put a computer lab or have a computer science class in
a middle or elementary school and think everything is going to change.
It doesn’t work that way,” Saujani said at the event. “Many girls and
girls of color still feel unwelcome.”
Nationally, girls make up 37.5 percent of all students in K-12 computer
science classes. For those from historically underrepresented
populations, such as black, Latina and low-income girls, that number
plummets to 15.5 percent. Girls Who Code is committed to getting those
numbers to reflect the gender makeup of the country. And it's not just
the girls who stand to gain, Pressley said: "The power of diversity in
STEM, in every industry and agency, means there'll be greater
innovation because there are diverse perspectives."
A critical part of getting to gender parity in STEM fields, Saujani
said, is having schools track and report the demographic data of their
computer science classes. “You cannot change what you cannot measure,”
she said. “If you’re not actually looking at the composition of these
classrooms, you cannot improve them.”
Diversify CS, Diversify the Economy
In addition to tracking and publishing participation rates, Girls Who
Code recommends that lawmakers consider policies to fund gender
inclusion training for teachers, expand computer science education to
all middle schools and increase girls’ exposure to women in tech who
they can identify with and look up to.
West Virginia is one of a handful of states that already tracks female
participation in computer science and STEM classes, Capito said at the
event. “Because of that, our participation rate is higher than the
national average,” by nearly two percentage points. The senator also
noted that, as a state with an historically energy-based economy, West
Virginia has been trying to find ways to diversify its economy.
“I want to see our young girls and young women lead the way in that
diversification,” Capito said. “You don’t have to live in New York City
or Silicon Valley to do these jobs. You can sit in Fairmont, West
Virginia, and go and make a difference.”
In the seven years since its founding, Girls Who Code has taught
computer skills to 185,000 girls, half of whom are black or Latina. The
nonprofit estimates that computer science could reach gender parity by
2027, but “to move faster, to reach every single girl in every town,
every parish, every community,” Saujani said, “we need the government’s
help.”
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