Children as young as two should be introduced to the basics of coding, according to one of Britain’s most eminent computing pioneers.
Dame Stephanie Shirley, whose company was one of the first to sell software in the 1960s, said that engaging very young children – in particular girls – could ignite a passion for puzzles and problem-solving long before the “male geek” stereotype took hold.
“I don’t think you can start too early,” she said, adding that evidence suggested that the best time to introduce children to simple coding activities was between the ages of two and seven years. “Most successful later coders start between five and six,” she added. “In a sense, those years are the best for learning anything … and means that programming [hasn’t] become set in your mind as geeky or nerdy.”
Shirley’s comments came as A-level results last week revealed a striking gender divide in computing, with only 9.8% of those taking the subject at A-level being girls.
Shirley also called on tech companies, such as Google and Facebook, to introduce anonymous recruitment to help address the lack of female programmers. Only 20% of Google engineers are female (the statistic is roughly matched across the industry) and one recent report showed male founders are nearly twice as likely to attract venture capital funding.
“Once you have an imbalance, the leaders of today define the leaders of tomorrow,” said Shirley. “It’s instinctive to recruit in your own image. I think some of this will continue until we actually learn to anonymise some of our relationships and computers help in that.”
Programmers, she argued, should be assessed on skill, just as secretaries were once given typing tests. “You don’t send a photo, you don’t give a name, you just look at the achievements of the person as a selection process,” she said.
She describes the recent internal memo by a former Google engineer as “so patronising” and “utterly unacceptable” and added that a failure to tackle the gender gap had led to “very macho” cultures in some tech companies, from which women felt excluded.
Shirley contrasts this with the ethos at her first company, Freelance Programmers, which in the 1960s was among the first to sell technical software packages. Out of the first 300 staff, she employed just three male programmers and the gender ratio only shifted significantly when the Sex Discrimination Act passed in 1975.
“You’d think I’d be as happy as anything because I’m a bit of a feminist, but that really meant that my woman’s company had to let the men in,” she said.
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