Kenwood Tech Time decided to have a “girls only” day. By the most recent formal count (numbers are growing rapidly), we had twelve boys and seven girls at Tech Time. That’s not terrible – but it’s not 50/50. So Miriam (Kenwood’s school librarian) had a few girls make posters to spread around the school announcing Girls’ Tech Time.
Word spread quickly and of course there was backlash. As I walked through the school, various boys would call me out in the hall or the gym. “You’re kicking us out,” Achilles (not his real name) shouted at me. It was lunchtime, and he had to shout to be heard over the noise, but still – he shouted at me.
“No, I am not,” I called back, walking to his table.
“Yeah,” he replied at a more reasonable volume, “boys can’t come now.”
“Just this one day,” I said. “Nobody’s getting kicked out. We’re just having one day for girls only.”
“Well, we should have a boys only day,” Democritus (not his real name) said. Half a dozen boys at the table cheered agreement.
“No, we will not,” I said firmly.
“What?! But that’s not fair,” Democritus exclaimed.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said, “But not for the reason you think. We’ll talk about this more later, I promise.”
The workshop itself went swimmingly – we had twenty-five girls show up! If they came to Tech Time every day, they’d outnumber the boys two-to-one! Miriam took the lead, explaining why we were having a girls only day and what we were doing. She then led a brainstorm, asking the girls what would make Tech Time a welcoming space, and what sorts of workshops they’d like to do. We got a bunch of great suggestions, many of which have already been implemented in the following quarters, including sticker-making and digital embroidery workshops, both supported by the Fab Lab.
The girls also got to decide on the rules. There was going to be a Girls Lead day each week, and the girls themselves could choose whether it would always be girls only, or if boys could come too. Miriam explained that if boys came to Girls Lead day, the girls would still be choosing the activities and the boys couldn’t take over. The girls voted unanimously to allow the boys to attend.
The rest of the workshop was a flurry of activity. Adriana from Wolfram Research gave a Raspberry Pi demonstration, a student’s mom ran a stop-motion workshop, and there were also hardware and Scratch activities.
The following afternoon, we were prepared. The boys, once again outnumbering the girls, were clamoring for a boys only day, calling for a vote, starting chants – all proper activism, sadly misdirected. We settled them down and promised them that this was exactly what we were going to talk about, but before we did anything, the students needed to know a few things.
Hailley had found a video to show from Intel about women in the field of computer science. The most shocking statistic – which we took some time to explain – is that while 74% of girls express interest in STEM-related fields, only 0.3% major in computer science. After the video, we took some time to discuss why this might be.
I talked a little about Esther Conwell. Esther did pioneering research on semiconductors, a key component of transistors. I had talked about transistors and vacuum tubes at earlier hardware workshops, so the students had an idea of what it meant when I said that without her research, computers as we know them today would not be possible. When she was first hired out of college as an assistant engineer (i.e. a full-fledged engineer who assists other engineers), she was immediately told that women could not hold that position and demoted to engineer’s assistant (i.e. a non-engineer who assists “real” engineers). During her career, she published over 200 papers and was the professor emeritus of physics at the University of New York at Rochester. She’s still alive today. “And none of you have ever heard of her,” I finished. “Why do you think that is?
“We see this sort of thing all over,” I continued. “When I was in high school, almost all the books I read were by men. Whenever people try to say we should get more books by women on the list, we hear back, ‘We’d love to, but the list is full!’ So how can we make room, if there’s no more room on the list?”
“Kick ‘em out,” Achilles piped up.
“Is it really kicking them out, though? Or does it just look like that, because other people have been kicked out for so long it seemed like normal?”
The boys seemed to buy that. I hope it sticks.
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