Mind the Gap

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It isn't often that we think how the things we say to people when they're young can affect them for their entire lives.

This week, I watched Code: Debugging the Gender Gap, a documentary film discussing the reason why women are less inclined to jobs in highly technical fields, especially those that involve coding.

This documentary was very interesting to me for a number of reasons.

First of all, as a person who works with media or computers, coding has basically become a part of the field. You have to know a little basic code just to get by in creating and building websites. I have to know how to code to embed videos on the website of the place where I work. So it is becoming slightly more integrated into different fields.

Second, the first place I experienced a gender gap was when I went to school. I have a brother, and growing up, my parents never put limitations on what we could or couldn't play with. Often times, if he was interested in it, I was too, and vice versa. So growing up I had choices to play with a doll house, or a Barbie, or a computer program, or Legos. It was once I got to school and mixed with kids who might not come from the same type of household that I experienced kids who had already sunk into the mentality that boys do this or girls do that before they were even 10 years old.

I can remember when I was in second grade, my brother and I were playing with the kids of our mom's friends. They were all boys, of different age levels. Most of them were around 10, another boy and I were about 8, and the final boy was 6. The boys all wanted to play with a toy that was considered a 'boy's toy'. I had the choice to play or sit out with my mom and her friends, so I wanted to play. We started to play and one of the boys got mad that I wanted to play, and he said to me, "why are you even here? This is a boy's game. Why don't you go play with My Little Ponies somewhere."

Of course, part of that just has to be chalked up to kids just being kids and being mean to each other. However, it's also an early sign that somewhere these boys were taught this game is for boys and that game is for girls. If I wanted to conform to their group and play with them, I would have to be okay doing 'boy things' and just realized I was never going to get them to do something I wanted. I could tell this was some sort of blanket statement in gendering, because I was never into My Little Pony. These boys had never heard me talk about it, and they had never seen me play with them. They just assumed that would be something I would want to play with because I was a girl.

This goes back to the documentary, where they said as girls no one considers if they're interested in coding, but they push all the boys to do it. So by the time they're in high school all the boys are already good at it and the girls can't even catch up. I think part of closing the gap is not making assumptions that girls wouldn't like to code, or that coding is too hard for girls. It's sad to think even in my own experience in the 2000s, that either there wasn't encouragement from the school for girls to pursue math, or there was peer pressure not to. In the documentary they speak to how girls peer pressure each other away from math because it's not cool to be smart, and I think that has an impact on girls as they select career fields.