Gender neutral technology classrooms
Uni-race Restroom sign by DavezillaI come from a teaching profession that is dominated by women and a school where most management and senior staff are women. I'll continue to grind my teeth when I am described as 'the token male'.
Any profession with a significant gender imbalance is the poorer for it.
In my field of Information Technology, gender issues are very real and growing. Two years ago, I blogged a report discussing problems by Google to recruit female engineers. Last night I had discussed online with Pia Waugh some of the gender issues related to information technology careers. She indicated that it is "a problem that can only be overcome through positivity, inspiration and just being the change we want to see".
As I now see this, just promoting technology technology gender horror stories will only work to further scare off girls and turn this into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Whilst it is a real and worsening problem, a chatfest about the issue will certainly not help things. Generally when I talk about IT as a career with parents, I smile and indicate offhand that as many girls do IT as boys.
It is only too rarely that a girl wants to join the computer games club we run after school each Friday. Odder when we consider this 2008 Brisbane news report about "Game Girls" that indicates that 40% game players are female. The boys in the games club seem to favour each others company. This is rather akin to the community sheds that blokes now build in the backyard to tinker with computers as reported by The Age in this "MenShed Worries" report. Considering that game playing or shed tinkering probably doesn't significantly drive any specific technology course or career interest, I probably dont need to worry as much about these trends.
In the classroom background I can continue to teach and ensure that there is a gender balance in promotion of results, interesting topics and role models etc. Occasionally this can raise the eyebrows of other staff. For now I can at least lay claim to strategies that make my classes gender neutral and frown at perceptions that it is a male dominated subject, feigning ignorance at the current state of affairs in the outside world. Lists such as The Most Inflencial Women in Web2.0 are a big help.
My 2009 VCE class roll indicates that as many girls as boys seem to have chosen to do a senior IT subject. I guess that I must be doing something right.