I think you might be able to use the AAUW report on the gender gap in
technology education as a way to open the discussion. They documented that
girls are still being short-changed when it comes to technology in schools
-
and they are a highly respectable organization (far from the radical
fringe)
that always gets a lot of press coverage for their reports.
The problem with answering the "why focus on girls" question is that it can
lead to a dilemma: if you use the argument that girls are being
short-changed, you run the risk of adopting a deficit model, where girls
are
seen as having to catch up to where the boys are. I don't believe that. I
believe humans socialized the way most girls are bring a very important but
different set of skills and understandings to technology than people who
have been socialized the way most boys have been. We need both sets of
skills. The argument I make is that the computer industry has privileged
the
skills boys bring and that we need to change that by paying more positive
attention to the skills that girls bring, both in how we design our
technology education and in what we value about technology.
Cornelia Brunner
Associate Director
EDC/Center for Children & Technology
<cbrunner@edc.org>
on 7/17/01 12:22 PM, Digital Sister at director@digital-sistas.org wrote:
Blessings,I find this topic a very interesting one, but I also find that
many
organizations do not want to discuss this topic. I would like to dialogue
on why this issue is so taboo. I find many people wondering if there should
be
something different for girls in technology. But I also find that many
people don't even notice the girls, as Ms. Brunner indicated in her opening
statement.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Apr 12 2002 - 15:16:50 EDT