Sunday, July 23, 2006
No more 'girls' jobs' and 'boys' jobs'
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
I rolled my eyes the other day when I read in the newspaper that e-mail is "the new snail mail," that young people prefer the instant gratification of text messaging their friends, via their cellphones, to swapping e-mail, which is so yesterday.
And I was gratified then to read in Current that Radford University held a Summer Bridge Program last month to spark the interest of high school girls in information science and technology.
It's a new age, girls. Save yourselves!
As for me, well, I'll be along, misgivings and all.
Let me explain.
I am familiar with the allure of text messaging. Great Britain was well ahead of the United States in the cellphone craze. While visiting a young friend in London some years ago, I watched, perplexed, as she clicked away on her phone pad and arranged to meet her boyfriend at a movie house a few blocks away.
He had a phone. She had a phone. "Why didn't you just call him?" I asked. I got The Look, and knew I had catapulted to the other side of the generation gap that social scientists first noted when I was her age.
I was feeling kind of stodgy again the other day when I was reading about "texting," a new word for a new age. But then I looked at the graphic that ran with the story. And I noticed that while more teens surveyed for the Pew Internet and American Life Project did, indeed, prefer text messaging over using e-mail to communicate with their friends, we are talking about the difference between 7 percent and 5 percent.
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Most teens, a solid 59 percent -- a landslide by electoral standards -- preferred to use the phone. And I am all about that. I started tying up our old party line when I was in the third grade, and I've been reaching out to someone, somewhere a good bit of the time since.
But other technological means of personal communications -- text messages, e-mails, blogs -- never have pulled me in. I shift as needed with the demands of work. But I'd rather leave all that at the office, and talk, rather than type, to people after I get home. (What's missing on-screen? Only every nuance of timing, tone and verbal tic.) And this resistance, I fear, puts me on the wrong side not only of a generation gap but a gender gap.
I use, tolerate and, occasionally, verbally abuse computers; they are beloved to the men that I know. It's been my observation that the bond between man and machine has carried over in toto from the industrial to the information age. Between woman and machine, not so much.
In an economy rooted in the "global marketplace," that can only hurt women economically.
Of course, even among my limited circle of acquaintances, I know women who are totally plugged in. And the entire sum of my narrow experience hardly adds up to proof of a great divide. Don't just take my word for it.
Take that of Joe Chase, Radford's acting dean of the College of Information Science and Technology. When he got his bachelor's degree in computer science 20 years ago, he told a reporter, "40 percent of IT students were female." After that, the percentage "dropped like a stone."
I've heard various theories as to why. But none that suggests any less natural ability on the part of girls, simply a lack of interest.
Which makes Radford's bridge program a great idea.
If girls think IT is dominated by men, they're right. If girls think IT is dominated by men because the work appeals only to "lone wolves," they're thinking in stereotypes.
In giving high school girls a chance to spend a few days learning what these jobs are actually like, the university can open their eyes to opportunities they might never have thought about.
Education critics fret these days that boys are falling behind -- that while programs like Radford's are nurturing girls, nudging them toward choosing more math and science or pursuing male-dominated careers (they're still the best paid), boys are being left behind. A recent analysis by Education Sector, "The Truth About Boys and Girls," challenges many of those fears.
But, yes, too many boys are failing to learn. So are too many girls. Most of these boys and girls are more alike than different: minorities who are on the wrong side of the country's socioeconomic gap.
And among the boys and girls who are succeeding in school, girls still seem to have an imagination gap: in imagining themselves in jobs that they see few women do. If they try them, they might find that they like them.
Girls might raise their expectations. Boys who have plenty of role models should suffer no ill effects from that.
Elizabeth Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
