So, one thing that this article ignores is that kids pick up really strongly on what is expected of their gender. I think the "let's make programming more pink" thing is silly, BUT hey, isn't that what toy manufacturers and clothing manufacturers all do to signal "hey girls, this is for you!"?
So if you slap a bunch of pink stuff on things, yeah, you're kind of making an invitation to them to join in.
BUT I think that the "girl" version of things is also always assumed to be the "easy" version of things. Which girls pick up on too.
As a woman trying to get into tech, I'm super uninterested in woman-only bootcamp type things, since I feel like the perception will be that I "couldn't make it" in the "regular" bootcamp.
I do think it might be different for little kids though, as they might be operating more on the "I want to do what's expected of my gender" level than a grown up who is able to think "I don't care what's expected of my gender."
Agreed, although in fact I have found that the younger children tend to be pretty gender-neutral in what interests them when coding. It is only really when they hit 9 or 10 and above that I have started to notice the girls favouring pink or flowery items more than the boys.
An interesting personnel anecdote I work in an industrial plant the diversity statistics here are pretty bleak - we have an internal social media site - mostly it is just used for company announcements and that sort of thing. The most popular post I can recall from recent memory was a picture of a pair of purple steel-capped boots and a bit of a blurb that one of our suppliers was now offering a choice of colors. It generated hundreds of comments mostly along the lines of "wow how can I order a pair of those" a lot of the comments were from female employees the whole tone was overwhelmingly positive.
Now I'm a male and hardly what you would call fashion conscious I wear steel-capped boots because it's a safety requirement I couldn't care one way or the other what color they are. Does offering brightly colored safety equipment count as pinkify-ing my workplace? At least some portion of people seem appreciative of having the choice available.
So if you slap a bunch of pink stuff on things, yeah, you're kind of making an invitation to them to join in.
BUT I think that the "girl" version of things is also always assumed to be the "easy" version of things. Which girls pick up on too.
As a woman trying to get into tech, I'm super uninterested in woman-only bootcamp type things, since I feel like the perception will be that I "couldn't make it" in the "regular" bootcamp.
I do think it might be different for little kids though, as they might be operating more on the "I want to do what's expected of my gender" level than a grown up who is able to think "I don't care what's expected of my gender."