Nudging Girls Toward Computer Science

My It’s the Economy column on Sunday looks at why traditional economic incentives alone don’t seem to be enough to encourage more women (or men, for that matter) to go into highly lucrative computer science jobs, which can often provide great flexibility to boot.
Part of the issue, it seems, is exposure. Most people don’t come into contact with computer scientists or engineers in their daily lives, and don’t really understand what they do. American schools don’t do a great job of teaching computer science skills either.
Trying to remedy this are numerous nonprofit and educational organizations, among them Code.org, which lobbies to get more computer science classes in schools. Others try to provide computer science lessons outside of a traditional school setting. Girls Who Code, for example, has eight-week boot camps that teach middle and high school girls programming skills – in languages like Java, PHP, and Python – as well as algorithms, Web design, robotics, and mobile app development.
But access to coding lessons isn’t the only factor in improving the talent pipeline. Role models (real and fictional) are important, too. Take a guess, for instance, as to what career aspiration is named most frequently on applications to Girls Who Code.
Nope, not electrical engineer, software developer, or really anything directly related to computer science or coding. In fact, many of the applicants don’t even know these jobs exist, or what computer science is. (Typically they’re applying because a  teacher or family friend urged them to.)
The answer is forensic scientist. Not because any of the girls actually know forensic scientists, mind you, but because they’ve seen “C.S.I.” or maybe “Bones,” “NCIS,” “Crossing Jordan,” “Law & Order: S.V.U.,” or “Rizzoli and Isles,” or some other show with a cool chick in a white lab coat uses scientific know-how to save the day. These shows have been credited for helping turn forensic science from a primarily male occupation into a primarily female one.
The second most common career aspiration that the Girls Who Code applicants name is medicine. Doctors, unlike programmers, are people the girls have been exposed to and whose work even much younger children can understand. They’ve met doctors in their personal lives, and have also seen glamorous yet relatable female physicians on TV (think “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Saving Hope,” “The Mindy Project,” “Scrubs”).
There is also statistical evidence suggesting that role models encourage women’s interest and persistence in the sciences. Women’s enrollment and attrition rates in STEM college majors — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — are infamously bad. The reasons often cited include feelings of isolation, lack of support, or maybe just caring too much about grades (there is typically less grade inflation in STEM fields than in the humanities or social sciences). One study found, though, that women who took math and science classes from female professors performed better, were more likely to take future math and science courses, and were more likely to graduate with a STEM degree.
Acting on this finding is challenging, of course, since the implied solution presents a Catch-22: How do you rapidly increase the number of female STEM professors if there are so few women in the STEM pipeline?
There are other efforts to pair up girls or young women with high-achieving technologists. Girls Who Code introduces its pupils to potential mentors who work at high-powered places like Google and Goldman Sachs. Similarly, one of the most important functions of the Anita Borg Institute’s annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, I’ve been told, is to expose women studying computer science to successful women in their field.
But still, these kinds of efforts are difficult to scale up. Which is one reason why so many in the industry are pinning their hopes on Hollywood to do some of the heavy lifting, just as it did to popularize forensic science. Pop culture, after all, is a much more scalable form of propaganda than one-on-one introductions at schools, conferences or summer programs.
Right now there’s very little representation of computer science or engineering occupations on TV or in movies, and even less representation of female characters in these fields. To be sure, over the years there have been isolated examples of female characters with sophisticated computing skills, including Chloe O’Brian on “24″; Skye in a new ABC series called “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” (which actually a reader alerted me to after I wrote the magazine column); Trinity in “The Matrix” movies; and the lead character in a recently announced MTV pilot called “Eye Candy.” But these heroines, or more often supporting characters, are still few and far between.
Creating a hit TV show with a science-minded heroine is easier said than done, of course. It’s hard to make a TV show popular, even harder to force audiences to care about a particular character on that show, and probably triply hard to get a very specific audience (that is, impressionable little girls) emotionally invested in that character on that popular TV show. (Lisbeth Salander from the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” may be the most famous female hacker character of recent years, but the books and films she appears in are probably not appropriate for the 12-year-old girls whose career paths the tech industry and women’s groups most want to influence.)
Cumulative media messages about career options matter all the same. Even if there is no one breakout programmer babe who adorns tweens’ bedroom walls, having little girls repeatedly see tech-savvy heroines save the day while simultaneously earning a decent paycheck — on TV, if not in their daily lives – can still help shape career trajectories.