I disagree. As a high schooler, I know many intelligent and creative young women who don't want to do robotics or programming because of the people in those fields.
High school boys in tech are much more likely to be misogynistic and socially inept than other high schoolers are. They make girls uncomfortable (they make me uncomfortable too, and I'm not event the subject of their creepiness), and this discourages girls from trying to program or build things.
There are women who can handle this quite well (the author of the piece is an example), but there are also many women who don't deal with this so easily. Those who can deal with the male-dominated environment will always be free to join mixed-gender events and groups, but girls' robotics classes target those who could gain a lot from having friends of the same gender who share similar interests.
Women aren't self-selecting themselves into tech, but there's no reason they couldn't. Women-in-tech events aren't fighting sexism with sexism, they're providing counterexamples to the misconception that programming is only for men.
When I was in highschool, I was in a model rocket club, and the science olympiad club. The gender ratios for both were roughly 50:50 (3-4 female-male for the rocket club, I forget the exact numbers for the science olympiad club, somewhere around 10-10). Both clubs operated very smoothly.
I think that you give highschoolers too little credit.
Rocketry and science competitions are not really any different from robotics and programming. None of them are exactly football team, if you know what I mean. The only real differences between "model rockets nerdy" and "programming nerdy" are a result of how the adults treat the participants.
> High school boys in tech are much more likely to be misogynistic and socially inept than other high schoolers are.
Speaking from the perspective of a current high schooler in tech, this is untrue. I organize the math club, and robotics club.
The gender ratio for the math club is 50:50 (4 female members, 4 male), while the robotics club has a ratio of around 33:66 (around 5 female, 10 male). I have seen few, if not none instances of sexism in these clubs.
The kids in these clubs are not really "in tech", but they are interested in science and math, which are similar fields to tech (and I suspect that their is overlap between science/math interest and programming/CS interest).
Now, your claim of them being socially inept has some truth to it, but these kids rarely have negative intentions behind their "social slip-ups".
High school boys in tech are much more likely to be misogynistic
That rings very false to me. It was not at all the case when I was in high school. In fact it was just the opposite, and I see no reason why that would have changed.
>High school boys in tech are much more likely to be misogynistic and socially inept than other high schoolers are. They make girls uncomfortable (they make me uncomfortable too, and I'm not event the subject of their creepiness), and this discourages girls from trying to program or build things.
Even if this is true, which I kind of doubt, do you think it will make them less misogynistic and socially inept to keep them as isolated as possible from women?
High school boys in tech are much more likely to be misogynistic and socially inept than other high schoolers are. They make girls uncomfortable (they make me uncomfortable too, and I'm not event the subject of their creepiness), and this discourages girls from trying to program or build things.
There are women who can handle this quite well (the author of the piece is an example), but there are also many women who don't deal with this so easily. Those who can deal with the male-dominated environment will always be free to join mixed-gender events and groups, but girls' robotics classes target those who could gain a lot from having friends of the same gender who share similar interests.
Women aren't self-selecting themselves into tech, but there's no reason they couldn't. Women-in-tech events aren't fighting sexism with sexism, they're providing counterexamples to the misconception that programming is only for men.