Priming the pipeline

In 1997 The Backyard Project, a pilot program of the Garnett Foundation, was instituted to encourage high school girls to explore careers in the computer industry (See 〈http://taz.cs.ubc.ca/swift/archives/garnett.html〉). At that time, the Garnett Foundation commissioned the Global Strategy Group to execute a survey of 652 college-bound high school students (grades 9 through 12), to help discover directions that The Backyard Project might take to try to move toward the mission of the pilot program. It conducted the study by telephone between March 25 and April 8, 1997 in the Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin metropolitan areas. It conducted all interviews using a random digit dialing methodology, derived from a file of American households with high incidences of adolescent children. The survey had an overall margin of error of + 3.8%.The top six answers from girls to the survey question "Why are girls less likely to pursue computer science careers?" in order of perceived importance by the girls were: "not enough role models"; "women have other interests"; "didn't know about the industry"; "limited opportunity"; "negative media"; and "too nerdy".The Backyard Project, in existence from 1998-2001, sponsored computer camps on college campuses for high school girls. The first camp in 1998, served 24 girls and by 2000, it had grown to an eight-city program designed to give 360 girls, most from low-income families, a week to learn high tech fundamentals and meet women in the computer industry. This high growth rate reflects the urgent need for programs such as this one.The following discusses the six responses given above by the girl survey respondents. The quotes that follow (unless otherwise noted), speak to the issues raised in the survey and are taken from comments made by the high school girls attending the camp at Stanford University in 1999.