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Title

ICT and girls: the need for a large scale intervention programme

Author(s)

Craig, Annemieke;  Fisher, Julie;  Lang, Catherine

Abstract

In recent years there have been fewer students enrolling into ICT courses and subsequently there has been a significant decline in ICT graduates. The decline in participation by females has been even greater than for males resulting in a further widening of the gender imbalance in this discipline. Much of the research indicates that it is the early years that influence children's decisions regarding career choice. For many girls, although they are initially interested and engaged with IT in their early years of schooling, this fades as they reach middle and senior secondary school. Reasons for this decline in interest include the perceptions that, among other things, IT is 'geeky', male dominated and generally not a people focused career. There have been many initiatives to try and redress the problem however most are localised, poorly funded and depend very much on one key individual usually in schools. This paper briefly describes the outcomes of the Young Girls ICT project designed to encourage girls to continue with computing. The paper considers what the best options might be for encouraging more girls to continue to study computing.

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies

Source

Proceedings of 'The 3Rs: research, relevance and rigour: coming of age', the 18th Australasian Conference in Information Systems (ACIS 2007), Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia, 05-07 December 2007, pp. 761-769

Publication year

2007

FOR Code(s)

0806 Information Systems

Keyword(s)

Computing studies;  Female students;  Gender;  ICT graduates;  Information technology studies;  Intervention program

Publisher

Australasian Association for Information Systems

ISBN

9780909756963, 0909756961

Publisher URL

http://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2007/36

Copyright

Proceedings copyright © 2007 ACIS. This paper copyright © 2007 the authors. The authors assign to ACIS and educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to ACIS to publish this document in full in the Conference Papers and Proceedings. Those documents may be published on the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, in printed form, and on mirror sites on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.

Full text

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