‘Because it’s boring, irrelevant and I don’t like computers’: Why high school girls avoid professionally-oriented ICT subjects

Abstract

The current paper details results from the Girls and ICT survey phase of a three year study investigating factors associated with low participation rates by females in education pathways leading to professional level information and communications technology (ICT) professions. The study is funded through the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Linkage Grants Scheme. It involves a research partnership between Education Queensland (EQ), industry partner Technology One and academic researchers at (affiliation removed for review purposes). Respondents to the survey were 1453 senior high school girls. Comparisons were drawn between Takers (n = 131) and Non Takers (n = 1322) of advanced level computing subjects. Significant differences between the groups were found on four questions: “The subjects are interesting”; “I am very interested in computers”; “The subject will be helpful to me in my chosen career path after school”; and “It suited my timetable”. The research has demonstrated that senior high school girls tend to perceive advanced computing subjects as boring and they express a strong aversion to computers.

Introduction

This paper begins with an overview of the trend, which is international, of low and falling female participation rates in ICT professional careers and pathways. By way of contextual background, we offer a short review of factors associated with this trend based on research conducted in numerous countries around the world since the 1980s. Particular attention was paid to factors associated with subject choices within formal education, since our specific focus is on the situation with respect to girls’ choice of subjects in their final two years of secondary schooling in Queensland, Australia as advanced computing subjects are recognized as leading into ICT career pathways (Anderson et al., 2005, Anderson et al., 2006). Forthcoming is a brief account of the scope and design of the current project, and the role of the survey component within the larger study, before describing the survey instrument and reporting the data collection and results. The paper concludes with an account of the findings from the survey with respect to female students who opted not to take advanced level ICT subjects in their final two years and their implications for the second data collection phase involving group interviews.

When we speak of professional ICT careers, we refer to roles like ‘designing and developing software and hardware systems; providing technical support for computer and peripheral systems; and creating and managing network systems and databases’ (Sandy & Burger, 1999, p. 5). These roles subsume the work of computer analysts, programmers, software engineers, computer managers, internet architects, webmasters, learning resources managers, and the like (Millar & Jagger, 2001). Accordingly, when we speak of pathways within formal education to ICT careers we are referring to subjects from the Queensland senior school curriculum such as Information Processing Technology (IPT), Information Technology Systems (ITS) and Business Communication Technology (BCT). Of these, IPT and ITS are widely seen as more ‘prestigious’ subjects because of the ways they are weighted, vis-à-vis subjects like BCT in calculating students’ Overall Position (OP) score (Queensland’s tertiary entrance score system) at the completion of Year 12. Consequently, they are more closely associated contingently with transition to University computing degree programs than BCT, which tends to be taken by larger numbers of students.

At a moment, when female participation in other science and engineering areas has been growing consistently across industrialized countries, the trend has been the opposite in ICT subjects and careers, and the trend is widespread. Reporting data from a comparative study of the United Kingdom (UK), United States of America (USA), Canada, Taiwan, Spain and Ireland, Millar and Jagger (2001) noted that female computing graduates are in decline in all of these countries, with figures in the UK lower than in Ireland and the USA. According to Cohoon (2003, p. 669),

In most industrialized countries, women appear to be a minority in computer science. Data comparing men’s and women’s CS [Computer Science] education internationally showed that in 1995, men earned twice as many math and CS degrees as women earned in Canada, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Spain and the US … Three times as many math and CS degrees went to men in Austria, New Zealand, Norway and the UK. Only in Italy did men and women earn close to the same number of math and CS degrees. [NB. International data were only available with math and CS numbers combined]

In Australia, national figures indicated the same kind of decline apparent in other countries. A study conducted across tertiary institutions in 2000 found that female participation in tertiary computer science courses had fallen from 26.2% in 1989 to 19% in 2000 (Newmarch, Taylor-Steele, & Cumpston, 2000). Recent data from the Department of Education, Science and Technology (DEST) indicated that the proportion of women relative to men in ICT has fallen steadily from 26.65% in 2001 to 20% in 2005. In March 2005, Australia’s Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts announced members of an Advisory Group to help plan a forthcoming Women in ICT Summit, and stated that women currently comprise ‘only about one fifth of the ICT workforce’ (Coonan, 2005, March 8).

A Queensland government report, Smart Classrooms: Report on the Girls and ICT Framework for Action (Queensland Government, 2003) claimed that in 2001 only 5% of girls in their final year of secondary schooling chose IPT, the ICT subject that carries the most weight in calculating student overall performance. The proportion of girls relative to boys studying IPT fell from 26% to 21% between 1998 and 2001. In 1992 5.9% of boys and 3.4% of girls took IPT. By 2001 the figure was 21% for boys. For girls it was 5%. In the 5 year period to 2001 the percentage of women in university ICT courses in Queensland increased from 15% to 24%. In 2002, however, the first year intake dropped to 18.2%. Meanwhile, the proportion of women employed in computing professions in Queensland fell from 26% to 22% between 1996 and 2001.

During the past 10–15 years the international trend toward low and declining rates of participation by females in formal educational pathways to professional ICT careers has been widely researched (Anderson et al., 2005, Anderson et al., 2006, Camp, 1997, Frieze, 2005, Margolis and Fisher, 2003, Millar and Jagger, 2001, Zweben and Aspray, 2004). This research has generated a range of factors widely recognised as being associated with aspects of this trend. Since our concern in this paper is with factors associated with subject choice in senior secondary school, we will only review those factors generally believed to dissuade female students from taking ICT subjects and programs. It is important to note that a large proportion of studies that have addressed subject choice have done so with respect to university programs and not with school subject choices. The present study stands out as one of the most substantial to date to address subject choice at the school level.

Five factors are particularly widely cited with the decisions of female students not to take professional ICT career-oriented subjects at secondary and tertiary levels. First, research indicates that many female students associate ICT subjects with a bad image, as being either a ‘nerd’ domain or as a focal point for undesirable elements of ‘male culture’. Other factors are also linked to perceptions of the area being ‘male-gendered’ (Margolis & Fisher, 2003). Hence, a second factor identified by numerous researchers has to do with perception of a male bias in software, which is seen as turning female learners away from ICT subjects (see also Gurer and Camp, 2002, Millar and Jagger, 2001). This second factor has an interesting potential link to a third, which is that female students often feel inferior to and/or dominated or intimidated by male students within learning settings (Cisco Systems, 2002, Gurer and Camp, 2002). Some research suggests that this can be a function of girls viewing themselves as being low in confidence and awareness with respect to ICT. The potential link to male-biased software comes from the fact that confidence and feelings of being ‘technologically savvy’ (Association of American University Women (AAUW), 2000) often come through gaming, and it is arguable that until recently commercial games were mostly geared to a male market (Beckwith et al., 2005).

The two remaining factors have to do with support for learning and awareness of the subjects per se. Research suggests that a relative lack of role models and mentors for females among teachers and peers is felt keenly in the later years of school and in higher education. With respect to undergraduate courses, Cohoon (2003) argued that students regarded peer support as vital for meeting the demands of being a Computer Science major. While peer support is important to male and female students alike,

Women don’t have the level of access to same-sex classmates that men have … In CS, not all women were comfortable with relying on male classmates for support … [Some] felt that when they didn’t know anyone it was easier to approach another woman (Cohoon, 2003, p. 671).

The fifth commonly recognized factor is poor knowledge about ICT as a subject. According to Kahle and Schmidt (2004), it seems as though ‘not being informed is the most important reason why women are not enrolling in computer science’ (p. 82).