Fixing Tech's Gender Gap: The Bravery Mindset
ALISON BEARD: Why do you think it has been such a hurdle to get young girls and women pursuing careers in Computer Science?
RESHMA SAUJANI: There have always been women in technology and computing, but things started to change in the 1980s. At the time, if you walked into any computer science classroom it would have been 40 per cent girls and 60 per cent boys — very close to parity. But then those numbers started trickling to where we are now, which is less than 20 per cent — and I believe it’s because of our culture.
In the 1980s we saw the birth of the ‘brogrammer’ in films like Weird Science and Revenge of the Nerds. And when you asked girls, ‘What does a computer scientist look like?’, it looked like a dude with a hoodie sitting in a basement somewhere. You can’t be what you cannot see. We created this caricature of what it looked like to be a computer scientist, and girls just didn’t see themselves in it.
I also think a lot of it has to do with the way we raise our kids. We raise girls to be perfect and we raise boys to be brave. Early on, girls start believing that they are either good at something or bad at something. For every single one of us, math is not immediately easy; it’s annoying and challenging. But if a girl gets an answer wrong, instead of saying, ‘Wait, let me try that again’, she often goes straight to ‘I’m not smart’.
Just look at . He. He could have totally failed — but he just went for it. It’s such a white guy thing to do. It took me 33 years to figure out that brown girls can do white-guy things, too.
