Decolonization and Inclusion

Within schools and education there are going to be subjects that are believed to appeal to men more than women and vice versa, in this case it will be within computing and in technological areas. Computing is seen as a predominantly male heavy subject, while yes there are successful females in the industry it doesn’t change the fact that “only 19% of computer science related degrees were female, with a staggering 81% of students being male” (STEM Women, 2020). This makes it one of the most male dominated subjects out there, both within education and in the real world, this is only matched by 1 other subject, that being Engineering and Technology, However these statistics are from the years 2017 – 2018 meaning that it is possible that one of these subjects now has a somewhat larger female crowd attached to it. STEM Women It is currently estimated that less than 24% of white, British boys from working-class backgrounds leave school with five GCSEs at grade C or above.” (Mackay F, 2017) h...

  Code Like a Girl Throughout my years in education, whether that be during my years in college or during my undergrad I have always found it difficult accepting the fact of being the only girl on my course. It never made sense  to me why computer science related subject was seen as male dominant subject. It raised the question to why it is seen as a male dominant subject? It is quite shocking that even today in the 21st century an eyebrow is always raised when I introduce what kind of background I belong to. Something which I defiently want to change. Whilst researching I came to know that women were in fact one of the very first computer scientists to exist. In the era of the WW2 women were mostly known for working within software and being one of the first every computer scientists? All we need to do is pay attention to this matter, we are always to quickly name famous male computer scientists but what about the famous female ones? None of can even think of a name. All we n...

  If you do a search in google with the term “computer scientist” you will realise that at first glance most of the results you get are men, and all are white.  Image 1: Google search results “computer scientist”. Source: google search, 4th Feb 2020 However, with little research one will discover that this does not represent with fairness the story of computer science. William Lau, a computer science teacher who has a great amount of excellent resources for Computer Science teachers in his page , did a great poster which shows the diversity of the pioneers in tech, highlighting that there were and are many women and non-white people that have done a huge contribution to what today computer science is.      Image 2:  BAME Pioneers in Tech.  Source: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/5/folders/12VdfGYg1eLV1vCxXHtV-5xMbJRg7BzZ4   The poster is fantastic, showing clearly how pioneering work comes from different places, and that there is represen...