Girls in grades 6-12 can take advantage of a free Girls Who Code program coming to Wellesley Free Library on Wednesday nights from July 13 to Aug. 3.
Rising Wellesley High junior Eleanor Boyd is working with the national Girls Who Code organization to bring the fun introductory classes to town this summer. She says the girls will be learning a mix of Scratch, Python, JavaScript and Actimator, and will learn via online lessons, projects and hands-on work.
Each class is 2 hours long (6:30-8:30pm) and those who sign up (by emailing wellesleygwc@gmail.
This coding class for girls seems like a great endeavor on the high school student’s part. However, it also strikes me as sexist. And perhaps since it’s being held in a public building, maybe some young males could be included.
Perhaps a young male can take the initiative, as Ms. Boyd has done, to start a ‘boys who code’ class. It seems to me that this is an effort to give girls a leg up in an otherwise male dominated field. Please don’t cast dispersion, or PC seeming comments,, on an otherwise positive endeavor.
I think this says it all:
“After all, women make up a very small percentage of software developers – 11.2% according to one 2013 survey – and the presence of sexism in all corners of the overwhelmingly male tech industry has been well documented.
So the student researchers were surprised when their hypothesis proved false – code written by women was in fact more likely to be approved by their peers than code written by men. But that wasn’t the end of the story: this only proved true as long as their peers didn’t realise the code had been written by a woman.
“Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless,” the study’s authors write.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github