Teacher tackling technology gender gap

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Brad Brockmueller blames a stereotype for the lopsided number of boys in his classes.

And the problem getting worse, he said.

"The stereotype of the computer geek or the computer nerd — 'That's not a field that girls would be good at, or enjoy.' I hear it from younger students." said Brockmueller, 37, a computer science teacher at Roosevelt High School here.

Except for his desktop-publishing course, he can count the number of girls in his classes on one hand. He actually can count them on a couple of fingers.

But Brockmueller doesn't have a solution. He hopes to find answers this summer.

Brockmueller will spend July and August at Twitter's Boston office, teaching computer programming to a group of 20 high school girls. The summer session is sponsored by Girls Who Code, a nonprofit trying to close a gender gap in the computer sciences.

The organization is hosting similar workshops for high school sophomores and juniors in 14 cities across the USA.

Brockmueller will teach a beginners' class, covering programming languages such as Scratch, Perl and JavaScript.

Fighting gender misperceptions is a personal battle for Brockmueller, who has a 10-year-old daughter. When he learned about the Girls Who Code, he recognized another chance to help make a difference.

"I don't want her to think that she can only do a certain job because that's what girls do," Brockmueller said.

At Dakota State University, Brockmueller said he noticed that men dominated his college-level computer classes, but they had more women than Brockmueller sees in his own high school-level classes.

"I don't understand," Brockmueller said. "It doesn't make logical sense."

Mercedes Joy, 17, is used to being the only girl in class, but she loves tinkering with computers.

"I always wanted to do something where I could see the product come out," Mercedes said.

If she installs a new operating system, she can use it. If a computer is broken, she can fix it. And doing that kind of work feels good, she said.

One of her favorite moments in working with technology was helping her grandmother install a game on her computer.

Mercedes, a senior at Roosevelt High School, is one of Brockmueller's students. She plans to study cyber operations at Dakota State next year.

Man or woman, boy or girl, the computer technology workforce is in dire need of ambitious students who want to earn a job in the field, Brockmueller said.

"If we're limiting our workforce to only males that program, we're really cutting down on our possibilities to fill these roles," he said.

The United States will add 1.4 million computer specialists by 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Women make up 21% of the roughly 500,000 computer programmers in the nation.

Brockmueller doesn't like the trend, and he doesn't want his daughter to fall victim to the same kind of thinking he sees in some young students.

"Any time I get girls in the class, I really try to lift them up and say, 'Hey, you have a lot of guts.' "

Girls Who Code has a simple plan for closing the gender gap: exposure. Women will need to fill 700,000 of those 1.4 million positions by 2020, according to the group, and its goal is to reach enough girls to make a sizable dent.

Girls usually do better if they sign up for his classes, Brockmueller said. They don't come in with a "misplaced overconfidence in their abilities," like some boys do.

But societal pressures seem to keep them away. Brockmueller said he sees even in the textbooks he uses in class.

Cheesy stock photos and lesson examples depict different scenarios of computer technicians helping users. The expert, a man. The user, a woman.

"When there's a problem, it tends to be 'her'," Mercedes said, laughing.

Brockmueller does on-the-spot edits if he comes across such a passage, including both genders.

The gap doesn't bother Mercedes, but she knows the problem exists.

She was the only girl in her eighth-grade tech-ed class, and she has been outnumbered ever since.

People have told Mercedes her interests are better suited for boys. She ignores them.

"I hear a lot of, 'Oh, you shouldn't be doing that,' " she said. "And then I change their mind when their computer's broken."

The Girls Who Code program seems like a nice idea, a more comfortable environment to explore her interests, Mercedes said.

Brockmueller hopes to bring back some of that experience here.

"Part of the reason why I want to do the summer program is so I can hopefully bring something back with me that works, so that I can promote it better here," he said.

By the numbers

• 509,000. Estimate of people who are computer programmers in the United States

• 21.4%. Percentage of women among them

• 1.4 million. Expected computer specialist jobs by 2020

• $89,250. Mean wage for computer programmers in California