Girls, boys, and computers

I grew up believing I should have been born a boy. In the late nineteen-fifties, all the things I wanted to do seemed to be reserved for boys. Whether it was climbing trees, being an astronaut or mathematician, or simply not having to wear pretty clothes. boys were always the ones in luck. Fortunately my parents, perhaps because they had four daughters and no sons, were supportive of my boylike interests and encouraged me to believe I could succeed at just about anything. , including all that boy-stuff. As a mathematics student in university in the seventies, when I was told by male mathematicians that there were no really good women mathematicians, I would think to myself "that's because women were never given a chance". I didn't believe in genderrelated differences in ability . just in gender-related differences in opportunity. I certainly didn't believe that boys were innately better than girls at math. Over the years since then the differences between girls' and boys' achievement in mathematics have gradually disappeared and at this point almost all educators agree they are irrelevant. In 1998, women made up 44% of the math majors at Canadian universities, a huge increase since the 1970's. Unfortunately, the reverse has happened in computer science. Today North American girls, boys, teachers, and parents frequently regard computer science and programming as something boys are better at. By 1998, women made up only 21% of the c o r n puter science majors at Canadian universities, a decrease of about 50% since the 1970's. Much of this journal issue is rightly concerned with adult females and computing. Nevertheless, many of the factors that contribute to the low participation of women in computing occur first, and perhaps most forcefully, in childhood. In the early nineties, after fifteen years of doing research in mathematics and theoretical computer science, I accidentally fell into doing research on gender-related differences in children's interactions with computers. It came out of deciding, like a number of others before me, that computer and video games might be an ideal vehicle for helping children to like and learn mathematics. After several months of unsuccessfully trying to interest mathematics educators and game designers in creating mathematical games, I decided to try to start such a project myself. The E-GEMS (Electronic Games for Education in Math and Science, see <http://taz.cs.ubc.ca/ egems>) conducted its first official research study in the summer of 1993. We had started by doing a literature search to find out what was known about children and their interactions with computer and video games. Virtually no studies had been done since 1983. Given the huge changes during the intervening decade in computers, video game systems and games, we thought it would be wise to start out with a baseline study. We incorporated gender in the study design because many computer and video games seemed boy-oriented and we wanted to be sensitive to gender issues in the design of E-GEMS games. We expected the study to reveal gender differences in game preferences and it did. What astounded me and many of the other researchers were the dramatic gender differences in the children's confidence in gaining access to computers and in playing the games. I remember thinking "This is the nineteen-nineties! How can girls be thinking that boys are better at computers in the nineteennineties? " Since then, there have been many studies, including several by E-GEMS and SWIFT (our Supporting Women in Information Technology project, see <http://taz.cs.ubc.ca/swift>), that have revealed significant gender differences in computer-related interactions and perceptions of school-age children in the areas of the world where computers are common in school and home environments. Gender-related differences have been found at every age from kindergarten through secondary school. Differences have been found in almost every area related to computers: how much time children use computers, what kinds of activities they like to do with computers, how they like to do a computer activity (e.g. alone or with a friend or two), how they perceive their level of skill in using computers, and how interested they are in learning to do various things with computers. For example,