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Ask HN: What would you include in a women-in-tech event for students?
Everyone loves the idea of “Yes, let’s teach girls and young women about technology careers!” However, too often I see people put their attention on “What do I want to say?” rather than “What does it actually help them to hear?"
Let's say you are planning to hold a school event to encourage more girls to get into STEM careers. What, explicitly, would you include on the agenda? How would the agenda differ based on age or grade level? What metrics would you use to judge whether the event was a success?
I’m writing a feature article in which I aim to provide a checklist of “what to include” for those who plan these sort of events. I’d like to hear from people who have personally been involved in such events, as organizers, sponsors, and attendees. If you attended: What should have been included, that you later wished someone told you?
- swiley 7y agoIn my experience the main reason women don't end up in STEM fields is simply because they don't understand what steps to take or (more often) they haven't been exposed to the ideas at all. Fundamentally (in the US at least) they're simply not shown compilers, CAD, electronics etc as high school students. The few women I met in college who went into engineering and CS did it because someone went out of their way to show them these things or their high school had a special elective program that had them play with the ideas. If I where you I would show them some simple neat idea that can lead to more complex conversations (Cellular automata is one someone showed me and that ended up being the main component of my first non trivial program I wrote as a teenager. I'm not a woman but I'd imagine this is a human thing and not gender specific.) IMO too many kids are "held by kid gloves" and aren't given the languages and tools to participate in adult conversations so they can see some of the more amazing things in the world (again, for me this was the C programming language, for many other people it was math) If you can give them something interesting (physical or not) to take home and study on their own you'll probably change their lives.
- tropo 7y agoSomehow this manages to be simultaneously sexist (why not an everybody-in-tech event?) and hostile to the fact that the typical woman might just want something else in life. That's impressively cringeworthy. By effectively calling out the STEM women as being abnormal and weird, you discourage them. BTW, we never see an effort to get boys and young men into childcare and midwifery, and very little effort for nursing. We also never see an effort to get girls and young women into road work, engine repair, roofing, smokejumping, garbage collection, oil rig work, and lumberjacking.
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