3 Mar 2008

Girls geeking it up?


If you ever end up at a tech or games conference, there’s one thing that you’ll notice fairly quickly – the male to female ratio being heavily skewed towards the men. But, according to new research out today from a UK supermarket this could be about to change, with the findings suggesting that girls may now be better at some computing tasks than boys.

The survey of over a thousand 7-16 year olds revealed that girls were more likely to know how to set up a word document, put a profile on a social network or upload a video onto YouTube. In addition, the survey also revealed that 10 per cent of the boys said they weren’t confident with computers compared to just 6 per cent of the girls.

MyTake – As a very strict History Master of mine used to say – Inconclusive. I don’t really think a survey of this nature can predict the number of girls that will end up in IT. As we are required to become more and more hands-on with technology, it’s only natural that our level of awareness increases. The other interesting thing here is the findings that girls are more likely to know how to set-up a profile on a social network or upload a video onto YouTube - So, in essence, they are more likely to engage in socialising using the web, which in my book is simply an extension of their offline behavior. I think a lot of this comes down to preference not ability.

1 comments:

Liz McLean-Knight said...

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