This New York Times article reports that teenage girls are more prolific content providers than teenage boys–they are more likely to create and contribute to blogs, online networking profiles, or web pages. The article suggests that this imbalance is not likely to translate into greater representation for women in the computer science field, which remains largely male-dominated. Providing content is not the same as the “hard core” activities of coding and programming, apparently. Might it be that the assumptions behind the content vs code division are part of the problem?

The article states

It is possible that the girls who produce glitters today will develop an interest in the rigorous science behind computing, but some scholars are reluctant to draw that conclusion.

I know programming requires math, but it is also a kind of writing. After all, we refer to different computer “languages,” scripts, syntax, and so on. Separating coding out from “content development” might not be as effective as drawing parallels between the two, perhaps.

I don’t know much about computer science curricula, but the very fact that technical communication remains a separate profession suggests that computer scientists are not required to do a lot of content development. I think this is changing; endeavors like Carnegie Mellon’s Women in Computer Science program are trying to use women’s and young girls’ interest in content development, graphics, and so on to attract more of them to computer science. Too bad that stuff wasn’t around when I was a teenager. I actually enjoyed programming but got in trouble in computer classes for creating girly quizzes in Turing (a language that I believe is now defunct?) like “Do you have knee fat?” and “What kind of girlfriend are you?” when we were supposed to be programming a caterpillar to move across the screen on our Icon computers (also now defunct). Speaking of which, does anyone remember these:

Icon computer