Girls and coding do mix!

When we first started Techno Ninjas, we were unsurprised that the majority of those signing up were boys. It seems to be an accepted stereotype that boys like computers and technology and girls prefer, well more girly things! Of course, having Karen as our Techno lead, we fly in the face of stereotypes and we hope this shows we are leading by example.

We would like to report on some of our gender observations and see if you can guess which gender we are referring to:

1. Focused on the project
2. Prone to getting easily distracted
3. Rushes to finish, the end result is the main goal rather than quality of work
4. Will spend more time on how it looks than how it works
5. Will spend ages staring at the screen before asking for help
6. Asks for help immediately, but wants you to do it for them
7. When they ask for help, they don't want it really, but want to tell you they know how to do it!

Do any of these sound familiar...? Of course they do, because none of these are gender specific :) It was a trick question - both boys and girls have all the above traits, there are NO differences. There are also no differences in ability. Girls are just as good as boys, girls can be focused, but can also be easily distracted and vice versa.

We're delighted that we seem be reaching more girls, the ratios are getting more towards 60:40 which is fantastic. We do have a particular pair of ninjas, boy and girl that have become like a tag team (we will mention no names). The boy is a bit older and has quite a lot of experience of coding, the girl is fairly new to it (started at our Summer Camp). They work really well together, it's great to see. They compliment each other's skills whereby one of them has a tendency to over complicate, the other one will simplify. They bounce ideas off each other and come up with some amazing creations and ideas. 

What we've witnessed is that our ninjas don't conform to typical gender stereotypes, they share a love of the subject and that is enough in each others eyes. So will we see more girls entering into the largely male domain of IT in the coming years? We certainly hope so and we will be doing our bit to level that particular playing field.