Wired is running an article (Why Girls Don’t Compute) on a new report by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation which claims girls are being ghettoized by the current computer culture. The report, “Tech Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age,” makes a number of claims about girls and computer education that ironically rely on some rather silly steretoypes of girls and women.
For example, according to Wired’s story:
Girls are also turned off to technology at an early age through computer
games that are mass-marketed toward boys.Girls dislike violent video games aimed at boys and want games that are
personalized and creative, where they can develop relationships with
characters, [Pamela] Haage [AAUW director of research] said.“They definitely want high-skill, not high-kill,” Haage said.
What a silly stereotype. I never beat “Quake,” for example, but my wife, Lisa did, and from what I saw she thoroughly enjoyed the violent hack and slash of “Diablo.” (And don’t even get me started about her use of nuclear weapons against the Aztecs in Civilization II).
And Lisa’s not alone — there is a rather large community of female gamers who play Quake, Unreal and other similar games online. A blanket statement that girls “definitely want high-skill, not high-kill” is extremely insulting (besides first person shooters require quite a bit of skill once you get passed the newbie level).
For some reason the same feminists who would scream bloody murder if anyone suggest girls want to play with dolls and boys want to play with trucks, have no problem stereotyping violent games as attractive only to males.
Similarly, I don’t understand what the report’s overall conclusions have to do with general computer usage. In my email and bulletin board conversations, the audience is usually close to 50-50 male/female, and a lot of the things the AAUW report complains about have more to do with women in programming rather than general computer literacy. For example, again from Wired’s story,
Statistics clearly indicate that women are under-represented in technology. For example, girls represent 17 percent of Computer Science AP test takers. Women make up only 20 percent of information-technology professionals, and receive fewer than 28 percent of computer science degrees — a number that is actually declining.
With the rise of technology-related jobs in the new economy, experts fear girls who lack computing skills might be left behind.
Huh? I consider myself to be extremely knowledgeable about computers, but never took the Computer Science AP test, much less wanted to go into an information-technology field. Simply because someone isn’t a programmer or an information technology expert doesn’t mean such women lack computing skills. What an absurd inference.