 I'm going to get us started here on the third panel, which is sort of about preparing the next generation. My name's Jeff Brumfield. I'm a science correspondent with National Public Radio. And I'm not actually sure if anyone knew this when they invited me here, but I do kind of have a qualification for being here. I was a physics major, so I've seen firsthand the gender imbalance. And my mother was a feminist archaeologist back in the 60s when it really, being a female archaeologist, was not an easy job. So I've sort of had some contact with the subject, although I am not myself, obviously. I won't. I'm very happy to have two very, very distinguished panelists here with me. Kimberly Scott is an associate professor for women and gender studies at Arizona State University and director of an NSF-funded program called CompuGirls, which is seeking to get girls trained in computational thinking or introduced to computational thinking. It works in Phoenix and Colorado. And then Ashley Gavin is not Reshma Shoujani. Am I saying you're right. But she is the curriculum director for Girls Who Code, which is a nonprofit that, as I read it, I think you're trying to get tens of thousands of girls exposed. A million girls by 2020. We're going to teach them all how to code. Well, there you go. So actually, because I think these projects are worth talking about, I just wanted to let both our speakers start by just telling us a little bit about what they're doing. So why don't we start with you, Kimberly? So I have to preface my remarks in response to something that Carol said. I'm that social scientist who always is asking questions. And I apply my work, particularly in sociology of education, to the work that I do with girls. A little bit about my background, I'm an educator. I believe in education. I've worked in Thailand in areas that were considered high needs. And I've worked with girls in rehabilitation centers. And so my background is not, as you can tell, computer science. However, from all the work that I've done practical as well as research-wise, I'm invested in how do we not only populate the pipeline, but retain girls, and particularly girls of color in those pipelines. Patriarchy can wear a skirt, one of my colleagues said. And it's true, patriarchy can wear a skirt. And so it's not only about getting more girls or more underrepresented communities into that pipeline, but why don't we change that pipeline? So it's not about necessarily leveling the playing field. At least this is my philosophy. Why don't we blow up that playing field? And so that it's really more reflective of equitable means. And so for me, I look towards culturally responsive practices, the work of Gloria Ladson Billings, for instance, the work of Geneva Gay, the work of Tyrone Howard, the work of Asa Hillier, the work of Teresa Perry, and so many others, who are saying that we know unequivocally that we want to increase the academic achievement for underrepresented groups. We need to approach our strategies differently. We need to think about cultural identity. We need to think about race, something that we tend not to. We think we're in this post-racial issue or era for some odd reason. We're not. We need to think about race. We need to think about gender. We need to think about ethnicity. We need to think about language. We need to think about sexual orientation. All those features that make us who we are. And if we don't do this, going to the point that Dr. Valentine said, we're using this one-unit analysis. And that's unfortunately going to influence our solutions. And our solutions then are very, very limited. And so as I created CompuGirls, I kept these issues in mind, identity, community, and challenged the notion of not only having the playing field, but changing it so that it's more representative of our identities along all those lines. I can talk more and more about this, but very briefly. The program is targeted to girls ages 13 to 18. The majority of our girls are Latina, Native American, and African-American. We are in two states in Arizona and Colorado. I'm the founder of the program, the executive director. And it's really based on getting the girls not only to feel a sense of belongingness, but also to understand that their identities are not fixed, that they can be a technologist as well as contribute to their communities, that they can be African-American or Native American, speak a different language, and increase their computational thinking skills while also contributing to their communities in ways that further them. Thanks, Anashka. How many of you guys know about Girls Who Code? Just curious. OK, I saw a bunch of people. I'll just start by saying that Girls Who Code is deeply focused on a commitment to teaching girls computer science. We're not really interested in getting girls. Code is kind of a strange word for those of you know how to code. There are many different ways to code. Not all of them are computer science. And I think computer science is really, we think computer science is really important to focus on as 70% of the jobs in STEM will be in computing by 2020. And that's going to be 1.4 million jobs. And there are only 8 million high school girls in the nation right now. So putting that in perspective, we need to fill a lot of jobs and we don't have a lot of people to fill them. And so Girls Who Code offers a number of different programs to young women. It's a nonprofit, so all of them are free of charge. And our flagship program is a seven-week intensive computer science course where the girls get through one to two semesters of college level computer science. Actually, I found some questions from the Harvey Mudd exam, the CS 101 exam. And we gave it to our girls and we have an 87% pass rate and over half the girls get A's. So these girls are really learning how to code and they're going to be really successful in college. And we also have a deep commitment to diversity. 87% of our girls are students of color and over 50% are on a free or reduced lunch program. So that's sort of who we're looking at. And our other program is an after-school clubs program, which is like our immersive summer program, but sort of extended over many years with volunteers from tech industry. Yeah, so that's sort of what. And I write the curriculum. That's my job. Well, great. So, Ashley, I wanted to ask you. I mean, we've heard a lot in the earlier seminar, earlier in the seminar about leaky pipelines and how there are people, women coming in and then leaving academia and leaving these professions. But I mean, I think what's really interesting to me is what are the benefits of starting early and why do we need to start early? Is it, you know? For multiple reasons, just like for people, because I really believe that, yes, there are very few women pursuing computer science, but there are also very few people pursuing computer science. There are only like 70,000 graduates in computer science every year. It's not just a women problem. It's like a people problem, a real people problem. And I think it's important to start early because most of the fields that people go into, they have some exposure before they get to college. Like English, we all study English before we get to college. We all study history and sort of social studies before we get to college. No one has any idea what computer science is. And so by the time you get to college, you develop fear of things you don't know. And therefore, early exposure is really important. And another piece of it is getting their friends to get involved. And I know that sounds like really silly, but the girls who have friends in the program are much more likely to spread it to continue on. So if they have friends from their schools, they're much more likely to continue with their club. And so I think creating a community around the coding experience and just basically lowering the amount of fear that people have is really important. But why do you think it's important to focus on women in particular? That may seem like a dumb question. Right, no, I don't think it's dumb at all. I mean, I think, well, first of all, if there's this great statistic, you can see it in the She Plus Plus documentary. I don't know if you guys have heard of She Plus Plus. It's a great little documentary. But they pointed out that if we just got the proportionate amount of women in computer science all those 1.4 million jobs would be filled. Like if we literally had as many computer science, women in computer science as they represent in college, that the unemployment problem in computing would be solved. And so it's just a massive amount of people. But more than that, I think that women are really, really supportive of one another, especially at Girls Who Code. The support network is unbelievable. And they really look out for one another. This is a great story. They're so far through our summer program, 180 girls have gone through. And one day I received an invitation to a Facebook group for the girls in the program. And I was like, oh, this is cute, I'll join. There were 155 girls in the group. And we don't understand how they all got there because they're from three different states. So how could they have possibly found each other? I still don't understand how it happened. But they're all pinging each other being like, can you help me with my homework? Is anyone going to this hackathon? Are you submitting to this scholarship? And just like, they are so non-competitive. And I know a lot of emphasis on teaching STEM, especially right now, is like gamification. Like make it a game, make it competitive. We do the opposite. We do it super collaborative. And the girls are all helping each other. And they see each other as sisters and lifting one sister lifts another sister. And so I think that that's really important too. I wanted to ask you what you think are some of the barriers to getting girls into these fields earlier on. I want to go back to your other question also about why should we start with girls and why should we start earlier? There's in social psychology a theory called future time perspective. And one of my colleagues, Jennifer Huseman, is one of the leaders. And what we find is that by grade eight that girls and boys have a pretty good idea as to what they want to engage in in the future. And that they also start to involve themselves for better or for worse in those strategies. Again, for better or for worse in those strategies. And so what we know from social psychology, and this goes to my point of we have to have interdisciplinary or more transdisciplinary strategies. We need to have more social scientists talking with more scientists, talking with more technologists in order to come up with solutions. But we know from social psychology is we gotta get them by grade eight at least as particularly girls for them to see themselves in the future and also engage in what we call self regulatory activities and behaviors so that they can say yes I can become a technologist, computer scientist, a scientist. And particularly for girls, if we look at the work of the girl effect, if you just Google girl effect, there's been some wonderful research related to why should we invest in girls? Particularly in under resourced communities. What we find is that if we invest in girls you get more bang for your buck. You get more impact than if you invest in boys. Economically speaking, socially speaking. And so that doesn't mean we should discount boys but if you want the trickle down effect you need to look at girls first. Now to your question, what are some of the barriers? I think one of the biggest things that I see in the literature particularly for African American, Native American, Latina is a lot of times we develop these programs, these enrichment programs and we call them first of all intervention programs. And so we approach these communities as if there's something wrong. We approach these communities as if there's a deficit. And so then we construct these really weird ways of trying to make up for these deficits. And we do this very specifically for instance, we don't involve individuals from the community in the intervention. Because they don't really know what they're doing. We have this idea of certain communities being technophobic, that's Anna Everett's term. And then if you're in psychology, any psychologist here? No, okay, well, and I mean if you're phobic there's this innate fear of something, even or not we do think of some communities as technophobic. And we use this idea unfortunately to have intervention programs that are really assuming a deficit approach. Well if I'm a young lady and I'm coming in and you really don't believe in my community you're criticizing my background and you're also not involving my parents, my caregivers, my aunties, then really how do you see me? So that's one barrier. I think another one is that we assume again with a deficit approach that girls in this case girls of color really can't do but owe so much. And so we give very baseline activities. We may teach them how to do word processing. We may teach them how to do PowerPoint. But we save those critical thinking computational activities for the other. And that other oftentimes tends to be communities that are more privileged. And so I always question this idea when we're saying, well we wanna increase the number of acts whether it's women or African American or Native American, let's break that down. Which African Americans? Which Native Americans are we really talking about? Which women are we really talking about? And then if we start to get into some of those answers then we can perhaps think of those barriers less on the individual level but more on the global level. And then thirdly, a lot of our programs are culturally irrelevant. We teach the girls again just how to do X and not necessarily how to make the connection of X with Y. That Y being their communities, their identity, and again their parents, their caregivers. And so we know from the social science literature that girls in particular or girls of color will be more invested if they see how their efforts can contribute to the community. But we oftentimes don't make that connection for them in our programming. I wanted to ask one more question and then I'm gonna throw it open. But we've had a lot of discussion here. I'm not sure I've heard the word sexism used. I may have been out of the room but it seems particularly relevant to me to ask whether sexism is a problem in these younger ages because, well, I don't know how many people have been on Reddit, you know, a lot of these internet spheres can be quite misogynistic. I mean, do you think sexism is a problem, especially as girls are making their first contact with the world of coding, with the world of technology? And don't identify it as sexism. Or they say I've not encountered sexism. But this is a fantastic example of imposter syndrome, actually. We had our girls speaking on a panel and they were like crazy eloquent, way better than I am. And one of the participants asked, are you guys good at coding? And my girls have built crazy, crazy stuff. They've built mobile phone applications that can help disabled people navigate the subway. In New York, you can't go on Google Maps and figure out which subway stations are disabled accessible. And they created an app to do that and did the whole the graph search algorithm to figure that out and all that. And they were all like, no, I'm not really good. I probably have average. And I was like, if you were five boys, you'd be like, yeah, I'm good at coding. And I was like, yep. And it's that kind of internal sort of micro inequities that they face that amount to something bigger. A few of them have encountered, frankly, stupid boys in their classes who were like, you're a girl. You can't code, but not many. It's mostly just the sum of a lifetime of tiny little micro inequities that they face. Kimberly, do you want to? I failed to, you did a much better job explaining your program. I got so excited about explaining the philosophy. I failed to say that in Convery Girls, we have girls research a social or community issue and use various media to demonstrate their research journey. And so they create video documentaries. They use scratch to create games or simulations. They build in a virtual world. And so, but the approach is to get the girls to identify a topic that they think is relevant for their community. And then the technology becomes a means of a way to demonstrate their journey of that topic, their analysis, what they want the other individuals in their community to do with that information. And so one of the topics was sexism. Many times, many times, we've had over 200 girls go through the program. We've been in existence since 2007. Many girls do talk about sexism and they talk about sexism inevitably in relation to some other ism. They talk about sexism within indigenous communities. One of the topics was indigenous language and culture loss. And one young lady created a game aimed towards younger people in her community to talk about the issue of gender and how that affects and is affected by indigenous language and culture loss. And so for us in Convery Girls, it's not just about sexism. Inevitably, the girls talk about that ism in relationship to others and then create projects and documentaries and games and simulations to address those issues in really, really interesting ways. They're very conscious about the isms and the barriers, but oftentimes they just don't necessarily have the language or the resources to articulate their consciousness. And that's one of the things that we're attempting to do is not necessarily give voice, provide a space that they can demonstrate their voice and ultimately their ability to become technosocial change agents. All right, questions? So I don't mean this at all to be controversial. So I just wanna say this in this room is, so we just heard a major speech by President Obama on the importance of women, I think two Fridays ago. And we also heard of the launch of the My Brother's Keeper Initiative. And I wonder whether you think that there might be room for sort of a My Sister's Keeper. And whether you think that that would be important to raise up to a presidential level and what are some ideas that you might have that would be important for something like that if you think that might be a good idea? I think what I like to tell people about Girls Who Code is like, yes, on the surface, it's a coding program, but it's a leadership and support. It's like a community and we call each other sisters. It just started happening. It wasn't like anyone decreed that we would all call each other. It just started happening. And the way we treat each other is that any win that I can give to a sister is a win for me. And so we are each other's keepers. And I actually did wonder why there wasn't a partner program for My Brother's Keeper that wasn't My Sister's Keeper. I can't, I don't know why there wasn't, but yes, of course, I think there's room and there should be one. Ours is specific to women in technology, but I think any professional woman who's been successful has her sisters. I have not heard of a single professional woman who's like, yep, I got here by myself. Didn't need help from anybody. So yeah, I think there's definitely room. I mean, to just clarify, the statistics for young African-American and Latino and Native American boys are dire. And I in no way, shape, or form think that we should take away from that effort. And I think it's really important that we all support that. But I do think that there's something very interesting that we haven't had a major level push on helping each other as women out from someone of the same sort of stature. So is it Michelle Obama? Is it Valerie Jarrett? Is it somebody who stands up and says, hey, you know what, we also really need to make sure that we're supporting our young women as they go through? Yeah, I mean, even something like the Boy Scouts came around before the Girl Scouts did. I mean, this has been going on for a really long time. So I definitely agree that there's no reason why there can't be both. I mean, they're both necessary, I think. And I think that I agree exactly what you're saying, Kamsie, and yes, absolutely. I was at the White House the day before President Obama spoke. And I was there because of the work that we've done in terms of compugirls. Compugirls was honored by the White House as changing the landscape as it relates to STEM access. And so it was really an honor to be with nine other awardees who are all working on issues about access and boarding participation. But out of the 10, I was the only one who has a specific focus on girls, and particularly girls of color. But being in that room allowed me to see and also connect with other people nationally who are looking at the issue of race, gender, ethnicity. And at that event, someone did ask the question, hey, shouldn't we talk about girls? But I think just being in that room, accepting the honor, talking to other people, I think there's a growing need. And hopefully this conversation today can lead to more collaborations. So my organization works with middle and high school students in general. And as far as computer science goes in particular, how do you get a high school student who's maybe never been exposed? How do you get them to think it's cool or make it sexy to the point where they decide to go into it? I take an approach of just like, I try a little bit of everything. I have a slide deck that I do with kids. And for some kids, it's money. You tell them, especially in the underprivileged communities, like, money is a huge motivator. And so you tell them they're the highest paying job out of college. For some people, happiness, the software engineer is the second happiest employee in the country, preceded by a professor. So I guess Maria is probably the happiest person in the room. And then for other people, it's changing the world. And that one, you have to be a little more creative and talk about things ways like Ann May Chang from the State Department is used to work for Google and now she's taking technology in order to alleviate poverty. And these countries talk about those projects. But more than anything, even though you say this to them, and even though they recognize how cool it is, and you can show them video games, robots, mobile apps, whatever, the thing is I get all that, it's not for me. Like, I see it, it's awesome. I recognize this is cool, but it's not for me. And I'm very lucky because I failed biology and I was a straight D student in math. So I put my transcript up on the projector. And you're free to use these slides, by the way. And I tell them I majored in computer science, I worked at MIT, and now I'm teaching a million girls how to code. You probably wouldn't have guessed that based on my math skills. And I tell them I never took calculus. And like the discrete math class I took, I pushed my way through it and got through. And that's what turns a lot of the girls. And to say that it's creative, and I show them my artwork and I'm a stand-up comedian, actually, and I show them that and it's like I'm a computer scientist too. So that's the way that I like to show them. There are a lot of, like hour of code is one way, but I prefer a field trip. Like if you can get your kids, and like these tech companies are way more open to bringing kids in than you think they are. If you can get your kids on a field trip to any tech company, it doesn't even have to be the sexiest one, it doesn't have to be Google. Like they see a foosball table and they're like oh my God. Because they think that it's just a white guy in a basement. I really think they think Twitter is like just a giant series of basements with white guys in it. I don't know what they say. Yeah, well yeah. Kind of, but there's more foosball and there's more pizza and there's more sunlight. And so, like take, I think that's actually better than necessarily showing them a code.org video. Because a code.org video, yes, Mark Zuckerberg is. It's easy, but it's Mark Zuckerberg saying it's easy. That doesn't help you think that it's easy. I want to do just a brief promo for anyone who's interested in it. We're doing a MOOC, massive open online course, for people who would like to teach an explore computer science course at middle school level or early high school and it'll be available in the fall. And it's gonna be on edX. It's using scratch, but it's all of the ideas out of our CS5. And then we hope to have one for our intro CS class a year later. So if you want it's gonna be super fun and all of the lectures are done by our students. So we have lots of real diversity of kids doing the lectures and the demos. Everything will be available. You can do all your assignments online. So, and of course it will be free. And there's also girls who code clubs. If you guys want to start a club at your school or your community center, you can get my email and we can start a club. Okay, time for one more, I think. So Ashley, your transcript sounds really similar to mine, but the difference is I went into journalism. So I'm wondering what turned it around for you? How did you decide I'm gonna, it doesn't matter what I get in math, I'm gonna really go for this? There were a lot of signs that I should have been a computer science major. I was like a video game nerd. I loved art, but I did it all on my computer. And so when the computer, the big thing was the number one thing that changed me was my school started allowing anyone to take computer science and not just high achieving math students. Cause there's actually no, the experiment that shows the high correlation between math and computer science is actually flawed because they didn't just have high scores in math. The kids had high scores in everything. So there's just correlation between being smart and doing computer science, which pretty much apply to any discipline. So, but the thing that really changed is once they opened it up, my homeroom teacher said to me, I'm, he was teaching the new computer science class and he was like, take the class. You should take this. Like I see you on your computer all the time. You should take this. And he didn't make it an option. You make it an option, the girl's not gonna take it. You have to make it mandatory and start at a young age. And like, that's it. That's gonna be a huge, once we change policy so that everyone's taking computer science, it's not gonna fix everything. There's still gonna be crappy computer science classes out there, but you're just based on the level of exposure. You're gonna see the numbers change. I'd like to thank both of you again. I think that was great. And thank you. Thank you, everyone else.