Communications of the ACM
Tech’s Gender Gap Wasn’t Always So Bad. Here’s How It Got Worse
Filmmaker Robin Hauser Reynolds' new documentary film called CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap, explores the lack of American female and minority computer science engineers, as well as the many reasons behind this shortage.
Credit: CODE documentary
Robin Hauser Reynolds says her new film, a study of gender in Silicon Valley, was sparked by a call from her daughter.
This was about a year and a half ago, and her daughter was away at college. Sounding distraught, she told Reynolds she was dropping out of her computer science major, because she was underperforming. "Of course, she was doing just fine. She was in the top third of her class," says Reynolds, a filmmaker based in San Francisco. "But she was just one of two women in a class of 35."
The incident stayed with Reynolds, and she soon realized her daughter’s anxiety was symptomatic of a much larger problem—a problem that went well beyond gender. She started noticing headlines, almost daily, that pointed to a growing need for computer scientists in the job market. One report, by way of the White House, said that if trends continued, there would be 1.4 million computer-science-related jobs available by 2020 and only 400,000 computer science graduates with the skills needed to fill them. "This is not just a gender issue," Reynolds says. "It’s an economics issue."
The result is a new documentary film called CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap, which explores the glaring lack of American female and minority computer science engineers, as well as the many reasons behind this shortage.
From Wired
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