Why Girls Need to Switch on to Computing
The garden is coming along nicely. Flowers spring into bloom in the herbaceous borders; mature trees are imported to cast their shade across the lawn. If only real life was this simple. For Bernadette Carverry and Jessica Allen, both 10, designing a garden takes a matter of minutes, not years. Later they might switch to designing a room, complete with plasma TV, or a bedroom, with lava lamps and pot plants. "I like computers," says Jessica, "you can design lots of things." "I liked it when we got to design clothes, and do interviews," says Bernadette. "It was like something you see in a magazine." The girls are part of an after-school computer club specifically tailored to get girls interested in what can often be an all-too-macho world of computer games and web design. Once a week they come along from their west London primary school to the ICT suite of the Sacred Heart High School in Hammersmith, an ZZ to 16 maintained Catholic girls' school, for an hour or so of girly fun at the keyboard. And it clearly is fun. Every computer station in the room is taken, either by the dozen visiting pupils, or by Sacred Heart students, and screens glow with bubble gum colours as girls run a rock concert, design a magazine or plan a fashion show. "The target is girls in years six and seven. It's nice to be able to offer them something different," says head of ICT Niall Quinn. "They find it creative, and they are learning about ICT almost subliminally."
Behind the fun lie serious problems. Girls are perfectly happy to use computers as social aids, to chat with their friends or read e-mails, but they are not acquiring the heavyweight technological skills of using spreadsheets, constructing databases and designing web pages. Pre-school girls seem to embark on life just as interested as boys in computers, but somewhere along the way the rot sets in, so that only a mere fraction of the country's computer graduates are female. Which means that an enormous number of skilled jobs are closed to girls when they leave school, and the e-skills industries, in turn, are finding it hard to get people of the right calibre.
This has serious implications for the country's long-term technological capability. "Jobs are growing in the IT sector much faster than in the economy as a whole," says Brian McBride, former managing director of T-Mobile, "but there is an overall shortage of skills, and a basic gender imbalance in the industry. Only about twenty per cent of the workforce is female, and of the women who go into it, many leave to have their families and so on. Part of the problem is the IT and telecommunications image. People tend to think of geeky, long-haired boys playing war games!" Because of this, his former company and other corporate heavyweights, such as British Airways, IBM, the Ford Motor Company and Cisco, have thrown their muscle behind a new initiative to make computers more accessible and girl-friendly. The Department for Education and Skills came up with funding (￡8.4m until 2007), companies donated time, advice and software, and the Computer Club for Girls, or CC4G as it is known, was launched in 2002, with a pilot programme funded by the South East England Development Agency. "We did some research among women's groups and employers and we found that girls lost interest between about 9 and 13, and weren't carrying on with IT in secondary school," says Melody Hermon, project manager with e-skills UK, the national skills council for the IT sector, which is running the programme.
So CC4G developed software for an after-school computer club—mainly in a startling shade of pink—which would allow girls to do all kinds of things dear to their hearts from designing digital dance moves to planning a sports event. On the way, so the thinking went, gills would become acquainted with programmes such as Photoshop, MS PowerPoint and MS Excel, and gain confidence in all a

A. Very young
B. Older
C. Teenage