A Greed(y) Training Strategy to Attract High School Girls to Undertake Studies in ICT

It has been observed in many studies that female students in general are unwilling to undertake a course of study in ICT [1]. Recent literature has also pointed out that undermining the prejudices of girls with respect to these disciplines is very difficult in adolescence, suggesting that, to be effective, awareness programs on computer disciplines should be offered in pre-school or lower school age [2]. On the other hand, even assuming that large-scale computer literacy programs can be immediately activated in lower schools and kindergartens, we can’t wait for >15–20 years before we can appreciate the effectiveness of these programs. The scarcity of women in ICT has a tangible negative impact on countries’ technological innovation, which requires immediate action. In this paper, we describe a strategy, and the details of a number of programs coordinated by the Engineering and Computer Science Departments at Sapienza University, to make high school girl students aware of the importance of new technologies and ICT. We call our proposed training strategy “greed(y)", because it has been conceived as a grid of vertical (hard) and horizontal (soft) skills, intertwining topics to which girls are traditionally sensitive, such as environmental sustainability, health, etc., with digital skills and soft skills that the public education system more rarely considers - such as team-working, public speaking, social networking, and competition - with visible consequences more for girls than for boys [3]. In fact, outside school life, boys can acquire a greater aptitude for teamwork, competition, and leadership, by practicing more markedly masculine sports, and they also have a better chance of approaching information technology, through video games. Greedy is also a term used in Computer Science to denote sub-optimal strategies, as in our case, since we acknowledge that, in order to achieve a higher impact, similar programs should be proposed much earlier in a student’s career. In addition to describing the theoretical approach, the paper offers some project examples.