AAUW highlights technology gender gap
Six years after their 1992 report, How Schools Shortchange Girls, the Association of American University Women (AAUW) issued a new report, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children. Gender Gaps acknowledges the closing of some gender gaps in American education but voices serious concern about a widening gap in technology. "Girls have narrowed some significant gender gaps, but technology is now the new 'boys' club' in our nation's public schools," said AAUW Executive Director Janice Weinman when the report was issued. "While boys program and problem solve with computers, girls use computers for word processing, the 1990s version of typing."
Now a consultant to the U. S. Department of Education on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Weinman spoke about Gender Gaps to the Women in Science section of the New York Academy of Sciences on 8 April 1999. She was joined by Aliza Sherman, one of the members of the AAUW Technology Commission, newly formed to carry out some of the recommendations of Gender Gaps.
Weinman pointed out that Gender Gaps was written to follow up on the negative differences in classroom treatment of girls pointed up in How Schools Shortchange Girls, to examine how girls are faring with newly-set standards, and to look at ethnic subgroups by gender. Among the findings in Gender Gaps Weinman cited the following:
1) Coursetaking patterns in science and mathematics have changed since 1992. Girls are taking more courses that "boys customarily take," but usually not precalculus or physics, but boys are not taking more courses "usually taken by girls."
2) More girls are taking AP courses (but not AP physics) and exams than boys, but they do not do as well on AP exams as boys.
3) Girls' scores on standardized tests decline as they get older, for all ethnic backgrounds. Weinman pointed out that this is the same pattern seen by American students in general on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) and TIMSS (Third International Math and Science Study -- see cover story of our last issue), but noted that the decline for boys in verbal is less than for girls in math.
4) Introducing writing into the PSAT has improved girls' scores.
Sixty percent of the 300 job categories in school-to-work programs require computer skills, but girls cluster in 40 of these, centered around education, home economics, and the social sciences. Here Weinman repeated her quotation that girls tend to use computers mostly for word processing. To remedy the "technology gap" pointed up by Gender Gaps, Weinman reported that the College Board has already sent "Tech Check" brochures (intended to be informal, nonthreatening, a "first step") to schools to evaluate gender equity in technology programs. And the AAUW has established a Technology Commission to do follow-up evaluation and program development.
One of those commissioners was Aliza Sherman, the next speaker. The founder of Cybergirl, Inc., which has had a mission to empower girls with technology for the past four years, Sherman began by expressing her offense at 3Com's use of a nude woman in an ad for their Palm Pilot. "How does this motivate women to feel comfortable with new technology?" she asked. She went on to point out analysis showing that women in other technology ads were not using the technology. Given this, she wondered where the role models are to interest women in technology. Her only role models when she was a girl were Marie Curie and her science. But "Madame Curie was dead," she added, noting that the unattractiveness of her science teacher was no motivation, either.
Sherman feels strongly that the Internet is making technology exciting and creative, something women are well suited to -- and which enables them to engage in problem solving and helping people. To this end she wrote an article in 1995 for Ms, in which she sought to explode the myths that the Internet is too hard, too expensive, and too dangerous, and has nothing personally or professionally for women. "We cannot propagate the myth that the Internet and its technology are not for girls," Sherman exclaimed. She had no easy answers, but she felt that positive role models and mentors are an important part of the answer. Many girls don't feel it's OK to ask for a mentor, she lamented. She closed by asking people of both sexes to help by serving as mentors to women in technology.
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