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PUTTING THE WOW INTO
COMPUTING FOR GIRLS
JULIE FISHER, CATHERINE LANG, ANNEMIEKE CRAIG
AND HELEN FORGASZ
DIGITAL DIVAS
PUTTING THE WOW INTO
COMPUTING FOR GIRLS
JULIE FISHER, CATHERINE LANG,
ANNEMIEKE CRAIG AND HELEN FORGASZ
WITH AMBER MCLEOD
© Copyright 2016 Julie Fisher, Catherine Lang, Annemieke Craig, Helen
Forgasz and Amber McLeod.
All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright
Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior
written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the
publisher.
Monash University Publishing
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www.publishing.monash.edu/books/dd-9781922235862.html
Series: Education
Design: Les Thomas
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Creator: Fisher, Julie L., author.
Title: Digital divas : putting the wow into computing for girls
/ Julie Fisher, Catherine Lang, Annemieke Craig, Helen
Forgasz.
ISBN: 9781922235862 (paperback)
Subjects: Information technology--Study and teaching (Secondary)
Computers--Study and teaching (Secondary)
Women in information science.
Other Creators/
Contributors: Lang, Catherine, author. Craig, Annemieke, author.
Forgasz, Helen, author. Amber McLeod, author.
Dewey Number: 004.0712
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CONTENTS
About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Chapter 1 The Digital Divas Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 2 Evaluating Digital Divas: How Will We Know
if the Program Works? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Chapter 3 Research Design: Evaluating the Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Chapter 4 Background: Our Schools and the Digital Divas Portal . . . . 51
Chapter 5 Spheres of Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Chapter 6 Changing Girls’ Perceptions of IT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Chapter 7 The Ripple Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Chapter 8 The Wider Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Chapter 9 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Appendices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
V
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dr Julie Fisher is a Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology
at Monash University, Australia. She has worked and conducted research
in the information systems field for the last 20+ years. For most of this
time Julie has researched the area of gender and IT and been part of teams
which have implemented intervention programs designed to encourage girls
into IT. This work contributed to the design of the Digital Divas research
project which she led. Her other research has focused on usability and health
informatics. Julie has published widely in leading journals and conferences.
Dr Catherine Lang is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education
at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research focus since
1996 has been on the under-representation of women in computing, which
culminated in the national research project that is the topic of this book.
She has published on the topics of student transition to higher education,
computing education and pedagogy as well as social networking in
education. She is the recipient of several competitive national and university
grants and awards in recognition of her research strengths and her teaching
and learning abilities. She tweets at @Clang13
Dr Annemieke Craig is an Associate Professor in the School of Information
and Business Analytics, Deakin University. Annemieke’s career and research
journey has been focused on computing education at all levels; secondary,
adult education, TAFE and tertiary education. Her research interests revolve
around engaging students with and in ICT. There are a number of threads
contributing to this overarching research umbrella including: increasing
gendered participation in ICT, exploring the use of digital technologies to
support teaching and learning; and improving student engagement in the
ICT discipline within higher education programs.
VII
DIGITAL DIVAS
Dr Helen Forgasz is a Professor of education and Associate Dean in the
Faculty of Education, Monash University. The focus of her research and
teaching is on gender issues and the affective domain in mathematics
education; technology use for mathematics learning has been an area of
particular interest. Helen is a regular presenter at national and international
education conferences. She has edited several books, and has authored
numerous book chapters, as well as a wide range of scholarly and professional
journal articles.
Dr Amber McLeod is a Lecturer in Education at Monash University. She
has a BSc in Applied Biology at RMIT and worked as a Microbiologist
before completing a Diploma of Education at La Trobe University and a
Masters in Linguistics at Monash University. Amber was awarded a PhD
scholarship as part of the Digital Divas project. Her PhD thesis examined
the relationship between community attitudes to ICT and the outcomes of
the Digital Divas Intervention Project. Amber is also interested in cross-
cultural understandings of ICT.
VIII
FOREWORD
FOREWORD
I first became aware of the lack of women in the computing in 1987 when I
was a lecturer at the University of Southampton in the UK and we realised
we were starting the new academic year with no women in any of our BSc
Computer Science classes. This came as quite a shock as in previous years
women made up about one third of the class. In 1987 my colleague, Dr
Gillian Lovegrove, and I wrote a paper entitled “Where have all the girls
gone?” exploring what was happening in the world around us to bring this
situation about. One of our conclusions was the advent of the personal
computer, which in the 1980’s were being marketed as “toys for the boys.
This was very off putting for girls thinking about which university degree to
apply for as evidenced by the statistics. We hoped it would be a short lived
phenomenon but unfortunately this wasn’t to be.
Ten years later, Tracy Camp (1997) wrote about the ‘incredible shrinking
pipeline’ referring to the declining numbers of women studying computer
science. Eighteen years on little has changed. Despite the ubiquitous
application and use of computing in our everyday life, business and
education, and the development of devices such as smart phone that we are
finding we cannot live without, girls are still significantly underrepresented
in computing subjects in schools. With fewer girls showing an interest in
computing at school it is not surprising that fewer women are going on to
a computing career. The lack of diversity in computing is not limited to
Australia, but in fact is present in most Western developed nations is well
recognised internationally.
This is a problem that this Digital Divas program seeks to address, and
given the statistics published by the National Centre for Women in Inform-
ation Technology (NCWIT, 2014) it is not before its time. The NCWIT
report found that work teams with equal male and female membership have
been shown to be more effective and more efficient than single-sex teams,
and that when women have engaged in computing, they have been able to
Ix
Description:There is ample literature detailing the general lack of interest that girls show in computing, particularly in their later teen years, along with the subsequent decline in the number of women who enter the information technology (IT) workforce. In 2007, to address this problem, a new and revolutiona
