glimpse into their professional and personal lives. Through social media tools like Twitter, these young women can begin to imagine what the daily lives of their role models are like, and new coverage on the Web provides them with a longer view of particular career paths in technology.

The Web’s shift to more
emotionally rich content favors
girls and women who tend
to cultivate social networks,
develop emotional connec-
tions online, and create profile
pages more than men and boys.
Furthermore, the anecdotal
and storytelling quality of the
Internet today also makes it
a more girl-friendly domain.
And as young girls of the GenZ
generation (born after 1995)
become proficient in program-
ming interfaces like Alice.org
and social networks like Club
Penguin and Webkinz, which
promote storytelling through
the use of emerging technolo-
gies and cuddly stuffed animals,
we can begin to rethink conven-
tional strategies for increasing
the participation of women in
the development of technol-
ogy. It is imperative to contex-
tualize STEM education today
as something very different
from more than three decades
ago when Laya Wiesner initi-
ated the WIT workshop at MIT.
(Indeed, MIT’s current president
is Susan Hockfield, a noted
neuroscientist.) Clearly, we
must look beyond “educators”
and ““employers” to increase
women’s participation in the
STEM fields. By harnessing the
social component of today’s
technology, maximizing its
network effects, cultivating role
models through social media,
and understanding the appeal
of “purposeful programming” to
women, we can start to imagine
a world where the cyberpioneers
are girls [ 11].

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natalie Quizon is the user
experience and design
lead in the Knowledge
Transfer Group at Orange
Labs San Francisco
[ 11] Rosenbloom, S.
“Sorry, Boys, This Is
Our Domain.” New
York Times, February
21, 2008.

January + February 2010

DOI: 10.1145/1649475.1649484
© 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/0100 $10.00