Not One Girl Took the AP Computer Science Test in Some States

[FarCenter]

It looks like Girls Who Code is going to need to beef up its outreach.

According to College Board data compiled by Barbara Ericson, director of computing outreach and a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech, no female students took the Advanced Placement test in computer science in Mississippi, Montana, or Wyoming last year.

Around 30,000 students took the exam and only around 20% were female, according to the analysis, and 3% were black. Just 8% were Hispanic.

http://www.businessinsider.com/no-girls-took-ap-computer-science-test-2014-1

[shenmue]

1. It needs to get better

Right away.

[joeglow3]

4. Why?

I am a male accountant and make very good money. There is a trend where college graduates are becoming more and more weighted towards women graduates. Is that a bad thing? Do we need to focus on getting men more interested in accounting so it can be a 50-50 split?

I saw people should pursue what they are interested in.

[pnwmom]

2. My daughter had the tech skills but not the interest.

She's a PhD engineer who loves math, science, and engineering -- but programming? Not so much. Like her Dad, she finds coding extremely tedious. And she likes work that isn't so isolating. Besides being good with math, she has people skills, and she likes to use them. I think this is one reason more women don't end up in the field. They can do so many things with their technical abilities; they don't have to settle for a job that uses such a narrow piece of their skill sets.

[exboyfil]

3. My daughter does not enjoy programming

She is a high school senior who will major in mechanical engineering. She has programmed in four different courses now, and will probably get some programming in her statistics course this semester. She prefers solid modeling.

The AP Programming is Java specific. What my daughter could really use is a course on her TI-89. I expect it to get her the rest of the way through engineering (she has 1 1/2 years done already).

[KurtNYC]

5. I don't follow their logic. Would having one girl in every state take the test change anything?

(besides the headline of that article?).

There are only about 2500 females graduating High school every year in Wyoming yet 6,000 females took this AP test last year so that is the equivalent of EVERY eligible female in Wyoming and Montana taking the test. I can play with numbers too but the point is this kind of stat is mostly worthless.

Perhaps the real obstacle isn't race or gender but poverty and increasingly impoverished school systems.

[sweetapogee]

7. check out

the stas and comments from boys who code. They are not complaining.

[uponit7771]

6. My Niece enjoyed the programming but the field is too sexist... I'm ashamed at some level by not...

... telling her to get into it...

I might change my mind but she's gone another directioon

[ecstatic]

8. CS comes with a lifestyle that may include

being glued to the computer constantly, and even dreaming about code. I had a nearly perfect score in programming, but I didn't want to spend my life thinking and dreaming about code/programs. It didn't fit with the vision I had for my life.

[jeff47]

9. Wyoming isn't a good example. Zero boys took the test there.

No students took the test in Wyoming.

[Nevernose]

10. I don't think I was even aware of AP Computer Science

And some years I'm an AP teacher!

[hunter]

11. It's sad to me that it's still like this.

I started college as an engineering major in the 'seventies.

There were very few women in classes and the guys were often obnoxious.

I'm a guy but I didn't fit into that world. I had no interest in cars, I did not enjoy rude talk about "hot chicks," nor did I want to be the socially awkward autistic spectrum guy even though I was one.

I switched majors to biology. The women outnumbered the men in biology classses, even then.

My first college roommate was a fundamentalist Christian "Intelligent Design" Creationist. The few women he knew were messed up, but never around him or within their church community. They played the role. But outside the roll, not good.



Puritanical, patriarchal, misogynist, fundamentalist religions damage souls.

There's nothing stopping women from being Computer Scientists but our twisted social norms. Advancements in computer science would be accelerated if more women were participating.

[pnwmom]

12. There IS something stopping many women from going on in computer science.

They have the technical skills but they have other talents, too -- and they prefer to use them all.

My daughter is a PhD engineer, but she didn't want to sit at a computer, programming all day long. Like her dad, who's also an engineer, she found the process tedious and annoying. Other technical fields were much more interesting to her, and all the doors were wide open. It's not that she was afraid of C.S. She just thought other technical fields were a lot more rewarding.

You mentioned the guys on the autism spectrum. That's another factor. For many of them, programming is a more fun activity than it is for people like my husband and daughter. And there are fewer females on the spectrum.