Girls, Coding, and Gospel Potentials

Speaker 1

All right. It is my great pleasure to introduce my friend Cynthia Bailey Lee up next. Cynthia Bailey Lee, you can follow along with me in the program to read her bio. It is very handily printed at a font size, a half size larger than everybody else’s, because we recognize her prodigious talent, and we want to really reinforce that. She’s a lecturer in computer science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on best practices in computer science education. and is a leader in promoting inclusiveness in tech. She lives in Palo Alto with her husband and two children, where she blogs about Mormon life by common consent. And when I thought about what I wanted to say about Cynthia and how best to introduce her, my friend Amanda Farr said, you should just not try because there’s too much to say, and at some point, you have to pass the microphone over. Which is correct, but I’m still going to try. I thought about that phrase from What’s his name? Willie Lohman in Death of a Salesman, where he insists that attention must be paid. And I think we all know people like that who really insist, like, please pay attention to me. And Cynthia Bailey Lee is the extreme opposite. Like a lot of Mormon women I know who are incredibly accomplished, they ask that you not pay attention to them, and they just quietly go about Engaging in life-altering ideas and works and posts and building communities. So when Cynthia talks, I know that I want to pay attention. whether it’s about women in tech, or it’s about the LGBTQ community, or it’s a really good restaurant. I understand that if it’s coming from Cynthia, that we should pay attention because she’s always so thoughtful and so well researched in what she brings. to the table. And so I feel very lucky to get the opportunity to listen to her today. Please join me in welcoming Cynthia Bailey Lee.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Well, I want to thank the panelists who were in the session just before me and And it was my pleasure and honor to hear from them and people whose accomplishments and importance in our community that I recognize. So it’s a little bit different tone in my talk, but I do want to honor the importance of the topic. Especially now supporting our LGBT brothers and sisters. So I’m going to be talking about girls’ coding and gospel potentials. And so this is fun to bring together what I do for my day job and my Mormon side as well.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So I want to start by characterizing the problem. I’m sure many of you are familiar. You’ve heard that there are Is a lack of women in technology, and I think we have it even some exacerbating factors in the Mormon community. So, nationwide, 57% of bachelors. Degrees now are earned by women. So we know that women are excelling in school and they’re succeeding like never before. In higher education. However, only 12% of the computer science bachelor’s degrees that are awarded in the United States are awarded to women. In the Valley, seven percent of venture capital funding goes to women owned businesses. There are many, many stories. of not only kind of systemic sub subtle bias, but outright egregious sexual harassment going on in The venture capital community.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

In Utah, so this is the closest we can get to really measuring what’s happening in the Mormon community. Not that the Mormon community obviously is all in you. Utah, but we know that in Utah it has, depending on which study you look at, either the number one or number four largest gender wage gap state in the United States. States is Utah, and this has to do with the cultural teachings that we give our young women about our expectations for what they Should do with their careers and with their lives. And we know that at BYU, the percentage of undergraduates, or the percentage of their undergraduate computer science. Students who are women is actually quite a bit lower, even than this already low national figure of 12%. There, in from what I understand, kind of the low. Single digits. So, this is a problem that I care about and that I work very hard to rectify in my day job.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

There was A big milestone that we hit at Stanford that we’ve been putting forth a lot of concerted effort even before I arrived at the university to try To bring more balance to our computer science program. And we can now say that the number one most common major for undergraduate women at Stanford is computer science. So, yeah, yeah. Okay, that we’re still quite a bit below 50% men and women in the major. So part of that is simply that so many Stanford students major in computer science. Science, we’re the number one major on campus. So, a lot of just that overall huge numbers is what’s reflected there, but we’re very proud of that. Milestone.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So, this is something I think about and work on in my day job, and that I actually do not only as a practitioner of computer science education, but also as a researcher in best practices. for how we can make our educational work in computer science more equitable and appeal to a broader community, both in terms of gender, but also in terms of race, cultural background, and socioeconomic. Economic background.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So, I want to talk about why I think this relates especially to Mormondom and why, as Mormons, we should care about this problem. To try to work on this problem. So, the opportunity we have is that there is such an unmet demand for tech. So, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates That United States colleges will only graduate about a third of the computer science bachelor’s degrees students that we need to meet the demand for software engineers. That exists in industry in this country. So we need to triple the number of people who are graduating with computer science degrees in order to meet the job demand that is out there. There.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

The pay in technology is extraordinary. So, this matters because of that wage gap statistic that I pointed to in Utah. Our Mormon women don’t earn enough money as part of the Case that I’m going to make today. So, tech is something that could be very effective in solving that problem. According to the National Statistics, the median starting salary in January 2016 for entry-level bachelor’s degree back Computer software engineer is $72,000. That number sounds low to me. Stanford students, you know, there’s a premium there, but the students I advise, none of them are getting offers under $6,000. figures right now and that’s for a bachelor’s degree. So um so this is something that could really, really change the equation on the um ability of our women to be financial Financially independent.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

The other reason that Mormon women should be interested in tech as a career is because of the working conditions. the ability to work from home, to have a flexible schedule where you’re working part time with consulting or hourly. but still be making excellent money. A lot of the t problem with part time jobs in the United States, we’re terrible at producing quality, fulfilling, well paying part time jobs in the United States. Tech is the exception. There. There are very good jobs to be had in that area. Of course, the perks of tech jobs in the valley that are available in the office are legendary. you have not only the ping pong, but dry cleaning and free food and all that. Maternity leave has been something that’s been really in the news. We know that Marcus Zuckerberg took two months full paternity leave. with his baby, who was just born. And actually, I’ve seen him out pushing the stroller in the day in our neighborhood. He’s really using the paternity leave to really push a stroller around. So and we’ve had companies in the Valley recently announcing things like unlimited maternity leave. So these are things that I think can be game changers for all women, but in particular, Mormon women.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So I want to present my vision for systemic change in the power and independence of Mormon women. Joanna Brooks had a cute way of characterizing what she really saw as kind of priorities for Mormon feminism in the coming years, a few years ago, and it was: get grades, get laid, and get paid. And so and by that she meant go to school, get grades, get a degree, get yourself certified and build up your qualifications. and find a way to make money. And we’re so conditioned to volunteer our time and to give of ourselves in ways that are not financially remunerative. And so part of the reprogramming that we need to do culturally as Mormon women is realizing we deserve to get paid.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So, I was trying to think of how such a broad vision that I have could be captured in an image for this slide. And so, this is the one I picked. This is. A picture of me on the day I graduated with my PhD in computer science from UC San Diego. And that is my daughter. And this picture is very important to me symbolically because it shows not only the kind of union of different spheres of my life, being a mother and being a computer scientist. and achieving these things. But the fact that she’s wearing the hat, and I want her to look at me and see someone who is a living example of the aspirations that I have for her, and that she can see a role model for a future where every option is available to you. So this is what I want.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

I don’t want Mormon women to feel like they have to choose. This isn’t mommy wars. This is a bringing together of these parts of ourselves that have been fractured by a culture, not only Mormon culture, but really just a an entire nationwide culture that does not allow an integration of the different parts of ourselves. And I think we can do so much better than that.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So You know, there’s this debate that happens in Mormon feminist circles often about what are our next things that we’re going to work on. What are the goals? And there are those who are saying, you know, it has to be ordination. We have to have women ordained to the Priesthood, that is the number one goal. And not only is a long distance, but the one we need to work to now. And there are other Mormon feminists who say, you know, well, we should work on things like prayers and achieving. more voice within the institution, but not ordination. And I would say as my contribution to this discussion

Cynthia Bailey Lee

We need to work on building up ourselves and our confidence and our independence in our personal lives. And that will give us the strength individually to To go about the next step. So, for me, my first step is: I want all Mormon women to feel like they have They have financial independence. And I think that is the game changer from which many important cultural changes can flow. It gives you more power in your marriage, and it gives you more power in your life.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So I just want to point out though that this vision that I have isn’t kind of a radical fantasy. I am currently no more radical than this month’s February twenty sixteen Friend magazine. This is a two-page spread about Savannah the engineer, and it’s followed up by an activity on the next page where you has an explicit joining of boys and girls and how there can be overlapping interests. And you can be interested in math and you can be interested in art and you can be interested in all these different things as a boy or as a girl and there. There’s not differentiation there. So everyone, go home and show your kids the Savannah the Engineer.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Okay, so if my vision is to have a new generation of computer programmers, Mormon women. Feeling empowered to go out and realize their vision in their own lives and help change the world through technology and What are some challenges towards that? So Moment Culture does a good job of emphasizing education, but not necessarily career paths for women. We talk about going to school, but we don’t talk about what you do after school. The other thing is that girls have fewer role models.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

As we know, you can’t be what you can’t see. And so it’s really important to have a sense of ladder mentoring where people just one step ahead are turning back. Back in helping others. And we have this problem that there’s a self-reinforcing cycle where tech culture and the industry cater to the interests of the people who work there and is Fueled by the innovation coming from their ideas, but it’s just coming from one source that is a male source, and the female voice in tech is very missing. Right now.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So the result is that studies show girls drop out of interest in STEM around middle school age. So, the education studies show that girls and boys are equally proficient and equally interested in STEM science, technology, engineering, and math through about fifth grade. And then they just drop off the map.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So, case in point, here is a photo of me. This is I was active in computer programming in elementary school. I learned to program in about third or fourth grade. And this is me in fifth grade winning our Science Fair project. This is our elementary school science pro. fair, and I went on to also win at the County Science Fair that year. For my project, I wrote in the basic programming language. Raise your hand if any remember Basic, woo, yeah. All right, so I wrote a monopoly simulator and then I programmed it to play against itself thousands of times and figure out which properties were the best to buy. So this is me in fifth grade.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

I did not program again for almost five years after that. So it was late high school before I started. coding again. So those are five years that I could have been developing professionally and getting ahead where Where it just fell off the mat for me because I didn’t see anyone who looked like me who was interested in computer science, and it just didn’t seem like it was a girl thing to do.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So it’s not just me. Statistically, this is what happens nationwide for girls in STEM. So okay, so I’ve talked about some of what goes on and the research. And I have come up with a plan to tackle this head on. But

Cynthia Bailey Lee

A little more context for what I’ve done. Studies show that girls in middle school age, and I don’t know and wouldn’t take a position on whether this is nature or is just socialized. behavior, but are likely to be powerfully driven by altruism. So and then the career interests that they will express at this age reflect that. So you’ll hear girls talking about how they want to be a teacher, they want to be a veterinarian, or they want to rescue hurt animals. They want to do social work or aid work. They want to be a nurse or a doctor. They want to be in these helping professions. The problem that we have for STEM

Cynthia Bailey Lee

is that most people in society, and this is projected and we teach this to our girls subconsciously, do not associate STEM, and in particular do not associate computer science with helping other people. And in fact, some of the outreach that we do in STEM, though well meaning, exacerbates this problem. So, you’ll have people come in a little bit like I actually did at the start of this talk and say, hey, you can get rich overnight. Come learn how to code, and you can found some meaningless startup app that does not contribute to Science, anyway, but you’ll be rich. And this is not a pitch that works for girls. So

Cynthia Bailey Lee

In the words of we’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, so in the words of San Francisco patron saint Harvey Milk, I’m here to recruit you. All of you. I am going to demonstrate for you an activity that I did in our stake. And I will be sorely disappointed if not at least three people coming out of today’s event go off and do this activity in your stake. So I’ve explained to you some of the specific sociological and psychological factors that contribute to women dropping out of tech, and I’ll explain to you as I show to you the activity that we did. how it has been designed to address those specific problems. So I want to emphasize that in order to do this activity in your state, you do not need to know how to code. So, if you don’t know anything about code and you barely know anything about computers except how to use a web browser, you can still run this activity in your stake. It’s here’s all you need.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

You need activity day girls, and you need young women. I need a Saturday 10 to 2, I think, is the best time. To do it. So you just need a church building for that much time, and you need some girls to show up.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Here’s the plan for your day: young women arrive at 10 a. m. and you teach them what I’m about to teach you. And I can’t emphasize enough like all the talking points and slides, everything I have available. It’s all a package deal. And then you have lunch.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And then the activity gay girls arrive after lunch, right? So you have 12 through 18 year old girls coming before lunch. And the pitch to them is that they are coming to do a service project where they are going to help the younger girls. And so they come in the morning and they learn what they’re going to do. And then after lunch, the younger girls, activity day is eight through eleven, will come and the older girls perform a service project for the younger girls. So I think you should let them know that it involves coding.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

When I first approached RStake leadership about doing this in RStake, the stake president was over the moon excited about this idea, totally on Board and the State Young Women’s President was similarly supportive, but some of the ward leadership Of young women and activity days said, Well, we’re not going to tell the girls that it has anything to do with coding because that just doesn’t seem like a girl thing to me. And I thought. You are the reason we’re trying to fix this. Okay, so all right. But so it’s okay to tell them that it’s about coding.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

But the emphasis is on you are to the young women is you are coming for a service project. These adorable, helpless, eight to eleven year old girls need you. To come help them learn this important skill of coding. So we’re appealing to the altruism motive and we’re appealing to An interest that they might have and a need they have to do service projects as part of their young women goals that doesn’t rely on a pre-existing self-identification as someone who’s interested in. Coding. They’ll all be interested in coding by the end, but we have socialized our young women to not self-identify as someone who could be a techie or could be a geek or could be A coder. So any pitch that relies on that self-identification for the interest to show up will fail. So that’s the pitch.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And the whole lesson, both in structure, the idea that we’re having the young women come and learn and then pass that knowledge on to the activity girls, and the content of the lesson. are reinforcing this idea that technology is something we can use to provide service to others. So this part is actually the beginning of the lesson that I give. For the morning. So you could all imagine that you’re 12 to 18 year old young women who’ve come on a Saturday, and it’s about 10, 10 in the morning, and we’re doing this lesson.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So I start about framing this idea that knowledge and talents are part of our divine nature. The divine nature is one of our young women’s values. We know that learning things and having power and powerful knowledge is part of God’s identity, our heavenly parents. And so, certainly, it’s a trait that they have passed on to us. And The thing about having knowledge and talents is that they help us serve.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So this is a picture of my friend on the right in the Brown dress is Erin McComher. She is a professionally trained opera singer, and she spent years getting a PhD in opera. Performance and vocal performance, and now has that talent that she uses to serve others. So she gives a lot of Free conference concerts around Christmas time, but she had to work and she had to develop that talent through a lot of concerted effort. But anything that you know how to do allows you to serve others.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So we have this girl here knows how to perform a basic home repair with spackling. That allows her to serve in a way that someone who doesn’t have that knowledge is not able to do. So we’ll come back to that slide in a second. I want to say about it. But, you know, if you’re young and the only thing you know how to jump rope do, you feel is your special talent is jump roping, you can use that as a talent to make a new friend, to teach someone else how to jump rope. Probe.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

But all these special services that we want to provide rely on having some special talent that we’ve developed within ourselves. Another thing is you could study for years and have special medical training that will allow you to care for a new infant who needs your very specialized medical training. And you can serve that infant in a way that other people, no matter how well intentioned, cannot. But again, relies on you having spent a lot of time investing in yourself to build up those talents. So that’s the pitch that I would give to the young woman at this point. If I can just pull back and go on the meta level for a moment.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

These images were carefully selected to include a lot of women and girls, and people with different skin tones. That’s important. All right.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Next example of people who have special knowledge and talents to help them serve are superheroes. So the girls of all ages, 8 through 18, will recognize this. Family, and also important that I pick these superheroes and not Spider-Man or Batman or Superman, who all have the word man in their name. But here we have a variety of people of different ages and genders who have special talents that they have that allow them to serve the community in ways that no one else can. So it’s another example of how investing in yourself to build up skills within yourself that no one else has allows you to more effectively serve other people.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Of course, I feel like I have a superpower. When I did this on my Saturday in our steak, I put on a cape at this point, actually. I should have brought it today. I don’t know why I did. And these are some things that I can do because of special talents that I have invested many years of effort into myself to develop. I can make objects fly, I can make it so people can hear each other talking, even if they’re on the other side of a wall or on the other side of the world. I can make a car drive and steer itself. I can detect cancer in somebody’s body that the doctors usually wouldn’t be able to see so they can be treated earlier. And I can translate words between languages that I Actually, I don’t know. And the reason I have that superpower, of course, is that I know how to code. So

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Coding is a skill that if you develop it within yourself, you can do things like this, find new ways to serve other people. And it’s important that we have everyone’s voice and technology to do that because the world doesn’t need another app that serves the interest. Of 21-year-old single, white, affluent, heterosexual males, which is a lot of the apps that are coming out in Silicon Valley right now. We need people who have grounded in who they are as a person different experiences, different backgrounds and different values that they bring to the technology that they think needs to be. Be developed. And I feel like Mormon women and Mormon girls, the coming generation, have the ability to bring the core of who they are. And combine the best of this altruism instinct that they have, the best of the honesty and integrity and hard work and pioneer ethic that we have as Mormons, to technology and do something very powerful. So we’ll talk so this is where I just kind of talk to them about here’s why it’s awesome to be me, and it really is.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So I have the best job in the world. I get to teach other people. And this is a special thing that I think is important that I appreciate very much about the talent I have, that I think it makes it superior to, say, the talents of the Incredibles family or Batman or Superman. None of them are able to take the power that they have. So Superman cannot take his X-ray vision and bestow it on anyone else. So, they can use the power that they have to serve the community in ways that no one else can and that has value, but they have no power to share and spread that. By contrast, the superpower that I have that lets me do all those things is something I can share with other people. And actually, I feel that I have a moral obligation to do so. And that comes from my moral upbringing as a Mormon, understanding that you don’t lose power or decrease power within yourself by sharing power with others. And that power is not a zero-sum game. So it’s also fun.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

There’s selfishness in there, too, not going to lie. So I get to do fun things. Shout out Pinterest. Okay, so anyway. Um so okay and then um

Cynthia Bailey Lee

This is a thing, and I’ve so I’ve talked about this and presented it before, and I got a little pushback in some kind of feminist. Did I totally embarrass you? I’m sorry. In some feminist circles, about including a slide where I say that having this talent of coding helps me with my most important job, mom, because maybe we want to not be reinforcing that message that women kind of have one job or one most important job. And there’s a reason that I have this slide here, and there’s a reason why it’s Something that I feel sincere about and not something that I put in sort of to placate some powers that be because I was doing this in my stake or something. And that is because

Cynthia Bailey Lee

I think it acknowledges a very real conflict that Mormon women have that when we are at that juncture Ending an education and looking forward to a career, trying to make a decision about our lives. And this was a very real crisis that I felt. So I told you that I did this coding and was very successful with it as a child, and then I stepped away for several years. And it was towards the end of high school that I got a job, a summer job, and I thought I got it out of necessity. And I felt kind of forced into it by my parents. And they said, you need to get this summer intern. Doing code again. And I thought it didn’t align with the goals that I had for myself at the time.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

I thought I was just going to be a stay-at-home mom. I thought if I had any career at all, it would be in one of these very helping, nurturing fields. And so reluctantly I went into this. I realized almost from the first five minutes of the first day that there was just such a joy that I felt in being in tech and doing coding and such a feeling of awakened curiosity And excitement in me, that feeling that you have of like falling in love, where you just feel at home in a place that you haven’t felt in a long time. And instead of being able to enjoy that feeling for very long, I immediately felt extremely conflicted and extremely like I was very much in a crisis. And the reason is that I felt like I had to at that point choose

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Between my passion and what I was clearly falling in love with, or staying true to what I felt like I had to do, which was Be doing something that helps other people and be a full-time mother and these kind of things. And it really occupied quite a lot of my time and energy. That first summer that I worked in this internship, worrying about this, that I felt like I was being pulled in two directions to make a choice. Choice.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And so this is something that affects not only Mormon women, I think that affects us very strongly, but is also something that affects, I found, first-generation students to go to college. Many of the students that I work with at Stanford, who are their first in family to go to college, have a similar sense of real tug-of-war with their identity, where they feel like they’re maybe being forced to abandon their family and who they were before they went to college and making these kind of decisions. So, long story short, I think it’s really important to speak to the cultural realities and acknowledge that as Mormon women we put a lot of emphasis on motherhood, but with the

Cynthia Bailey Lee

The angle that it does not have to be a choice. And this was the kind I don’t know why it took so long for me to realize that, and I spent that whole summer stressing about it, but And I even went to one of my mentors at this internship and said, well, you know, what should I do? And how can I resolve this? And I didn’t speak specifically to this mentor about this Conflict with wanting to be a full-time mother, but I did say, Well, I feel like I should be going to the Peace Corps or doing s Some of these other jobs, and it feels selfish to be a software engineer. And their answer was, well, you could always do stuff that helps people after work. Like there was no concept at the time, or no message that I was getting from anyone that somehow work could also be helping other people. So it took me years to figure that out, and then it was kind of like, now I feel silly. But anyway, so it’s an important message. Okay, so how are we doing on time? Perfect.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

I have just enough time to tell you how to talk to a computer. So I’m gonna this has no gospel content whatsoever. But is just to show you that you can run this activity in your stake because, as I said, I am here to recruit you. You.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So, we’re going to do just the first part of three of the different languages. So, I taught the girls this Saturday three different codes that we use to talk to a computer. So, an important thing to realize about computers is that everything they do is in code. So, when you see numbers on a computer, what the computer sees is numbers. When you see words like that are on this slide, the computer sees numbers. When you see colors, the computer sees numbers. Every single thing that is on a computer, the computer thinks is numbers.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So I always tell kids when I do this with kids, you know, what’s your favorite subject? And you hear the whole range of, I like science, I like PE, I like math. And I say, you’re good at all these different subjects. You have talents in all these different things. And in that way, far superior to a computer who has talent in one area, which is the only Thing it knows is numbers. But that means that in order to communicate with the computer, we have to translate everything that interests us, all the things we want to do with the computer, all the ways we can help other people with the computer into numbers. So I teach them three different codes that translate the things we care about into numbers. And we do this all in one Saturday, all in two hours.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And then the young women turn around and then for the next two hours. Hours they teach each activity group. The first code, color code, is the code for colors and it’s called RGB. So RGB is a secret code. It stands for the RGB stands for red, green and blue. So there every color on the computer actually is three numbers, not one number. And it’s a number that says the first of the three numbers is how much blue there is, and then of course sorry, how much red, how much green, and how much blue there is. And so each of these numbers has to be between zero and two hundred and fifty five. The reason it’s two hundred and fifty five that might seem kind of a random number, but it’s Not there’s a reason for it, but we won’t worry about that now. Three numbers: zero means the least of that color, 255 means the most of that color.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And from that, we make all the colors in the rainbow. So it’s not like what you learned in kindergarten, right? That their primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. In computers, we have red and green and blue. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s how it is. Okay, so, and they mix in kind of surprising ways. So, if you have the most red and the most green, you get yellow. Which is not what you would get, again, if you were mixing paint colors together, but that’s just how it works on a computer. If you mix all the together, so you have the maximum amount of green, 255 green, you have 255 red, you have 255 blue. you end up with white. So with paint you would get some sort of like brownish thing, but we don’t. Okay. So test for you. Which of these colors is produced by the RGB code 255, 255, 50?

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And everyone’s pointing to the guy who will know. No, everyone’s going to answer. Discuss with a neighbor nearby you. Oh, we’re using teaching styles in this. We are. Go ahead, discuss with a neighbor. Yeah, that’s part of that. I took color theory in school, so you know I shouldn’t know.

Speaker 1

It shows you the plain media.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Okay, so who knows? Someone who didn’t know anything about RGB before just now, but now feels like you maybe know the answer, raise your hand and tell me. Yes. Yellow. Okay, why yellow? Because R is 255, red is 255, green is 255, and blue is 55.

Speaker 3

So if I look at the diagram that you have, it’s the most towards red and green and black colour. Yes, exactly.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So it goes R G B, so the 255, 255, those are b the R and the G, the red and the green. And so there’s the most of those, and then there’s hardly any of the blue. And what you saw in the picture is if you mix the red and the green, you get yellow. So that’s a very pure shade of yellow, but we have the fifty blue component there. So it’s this slightly off yellow that’s there. Perfect. Okay, see, I told you you could do this in your stake, even if you don’t know any code. So.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So we can take this, and if we got to our third code, which we won’t in this sample lesson, but they use these RGB numbers to create little web page greeting cards. So here’s an example of one that a girl made in our Saturday activity. So they make a little greeting card and it’s animated. The ghost guy follows the mouse all around the screen. So this was done with a young woman started it, and then when the activity day girls arrive, they get to customize it. It. So, the young women work one-on-one with the girl and say, You know, would you like to change the color of the background or the eye on this face? And then they work with the girl to edit the code. So the source code that creates this, the Java script code that creates this is on the left. And you can see, maybe it’s awfully small. There are these groups of three letters. These are the RGB codes that control the different colors on this picture. So, what’s that? Uh, you probably can. Let’s see. Yeah, ‘cause it’s in the extended window at well. Anyway, so they actually use these RGB codes for so the later Part of the lesson. Okay.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Um It’s cutting off that part of my thing. close it here. All right, so um okay, so we talk about how um we use these RGB codes to store computers on the computer. Um a lot of girls have done this and your kids probably as A great fine motor skill building activity teachers love, where you put little things on the pegboard. And this is how a computer stores images: that you get only one color. So you get three numbers making one color on each of these pieces of an image. And tiled together all these different things like a mosaic, you end up with a whole picture. And that’s how all photos that are represented on your computer are Stored. So, to a computer, images are just a matrix of pixels like this. And of course, again, each of these colors actually has three numbers that go into it. So you have a whole bunch of numbers representing all the reds for each of these different pieces of the image, and all the greens and all the blues. So, okay, so you learned one computer code today.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And the next computer code that I teach the girls is how to represent How to represent words. So this is a computer code for representing words that is called ASCII. And And it goes like so. So not only are all the numbers in the computer numbers, but actually they’re just zeros and ones, of course. So we have this cheat sheet showing our ASCII codes. So the letter A is represented by 0100001 and And so on. So the black squares are for our zeros, the white squares are for the ones, and/white or green, depending on which bar it’s on. And they get a little handout of all these. And then what I encourage them to do is spell out their name, or at least their initials, in ASCII. using these zeros and ones.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And of course, so this handout is something that was made to teach this to students. But I looked at that and thought, that kind of looks like Strings of beats, right? This is what happens when you bring people with different backgrounds into computer science. And I don’t think a lot of guys look at that and see beats, but I look at it and I see beats. So the idea that I had is to have kids make necklaces or bracelets that spell out their names in ASCII code. So they pick two colors: one to correspond to the ones, one to correspond with the zeros. And as part of this Saturday activity, they are not even using the computer, they’re making these necklaces and bracelets that spell their names in. Asking.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Now, as a teacher, there are a few things that I like about this. One is the sense of being able to step away from the computer. So many of our girls especially, but a lot of people are socialized to fear in some way the computer. Like oh, you hear people say My computer hates me, or it’s something that you worry about breaking, or it’s something that you had some sort of negative experience in your past with. So being able to do computer science, but not with a computer device, something that can help people feel attached and feel ownership, even if they’ve been conditioned by society to feel like there’s some separation between them and The device. So, the other reason that I like this is that it’s hands-on and they do their own name, so you have a very personal sense of ownership over this thing.

Speaker 1

And then the other thing is it’s an artifact that you can take home. So this is something you can see I’ve been wearing it, I wear it every day.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And I still see young women in our state who are still wearing those from it was last January, a whole year ago. We did our activity where they made this. And I told them, you know, because this is a thing that unfortunately we hear as computer science educators, that part of the reason that girls drop out of interest in computer science especially in middle school, is that the computer lab space at most schools has somehow allowed itself to be taken over and marked as a male space. So, there’s a sense that this space belongs to the boys, and then girls are excluded. And this kind of sociological phenomenon is enforced in various ways through microaggressions against girls who try to enter that. Space.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So I gave them this as a way to fight back. I said, if any boy ever says to you, you know, you don’t belong here, or this isn’t for you, or it’s It’s my turn, and then that turn never seems to end, and you’re not getting your turn at the computer. You can pull out your bracelet and say, Do you know how to speak binary and write your name in binary? And do you have your name spelled out in a binary bracelet? I don’t think so. And so they have a little talisman against the powers of the patriarchy to take with them. So anyway, and now every girl in our stake has one. This is very subversive. Okay, so anyway. So we have worksheets and everything that steps you through really easy. Anyone can do it in their stake, and you will give all of your girls a special gift. too.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So my closing message is we need help. This is my closing message. This is the last slide of the slide deck that I actually do in my presentation to the girls, but it’s also my last slide in the slide deck. To you, that I need your help. It’s very lonely. We have about 50 faculty, full-time faculty in our department in computer sciences. Stanford, and we have, I think, three or four women. So I am lonely.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

I hear from many of my students who graduate. and go on to work in tech, that they love their jobs, but they’re very lonely. That 12% figure for bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States in computer science, I think, overstates if you go into a lot of workplaces and look around. I visit different tech companies for various reasons as part of my job. And I’m not counting every single head, but it kind of it looks worse than 12%. And it can be very lonely. So I would like you to help cure my loneliness by sending me all your daughters and yourselves if you’re interested.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And I need your help to run this activity in your And to help our next generation of girls feel economically empowered and independent. They can make powerful choices about their spouse, about their family, about their lifestyle, when they know that. They have the ability to practically make that choice in their life, and they are not constrained into choices they’re not comfortable with simply because of economic realities. And it feels good. And women who feel good about themselves are going to be more happy themselves, that that has value, but are also going to be much better role models and bring much more joy to those around them. So, thank you for your time and attention.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Oh, um everything’s on a website now. So um here I can show you it was actually the web page I was showing you earlier. Let’s see. Oh, the question was, are the materials on the website now, or do you have to email me or something? And they are on the website now. Um I can show you the URL is can you see that? No, you cannot. It is. If you go to By Common Consent and then the little search box is up here in the corner, and you just search for girls’ code, it’ll take you to this. And it has all the slides are on there. And also the script for exactly what you can say. So if you have no idea what you’re talking about, it’s okay. All the words that you should say are here in between the slides. And then it has examples for the Coding part. And there are links to the printables that you need, the little secret code letters to map the zeros and the ones to the letters of the alphabet that you should print out and hand out. All the printables, all the materials are there. Any other questions?

Cynthia Bailey Lee

I like that actually, yeah. The suggestion was to change the slide that I talked about that to my most important job is being a mom, to be my most important job is to be a partner in parenting. That’s actually an excellent suggestion. So there you go. Those are actually my kids, those are free sunglasses they got from a trip to Google with that’s one of my students there with them on the Google campus. They’re they have a lot of fun having a techie mom, I think. Other questions?

Speaker 3

Uh you had the picture from the sorry from a friend who did it in technology or engineering. Um how do you think that message has gotten through That masculine liberalism and openness is a church magazine.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Yeah, I have to say I was surprised to see that. that in the friend we have promoting that. I do know though, so I visited BYU, they brought me out last year To talk to their computer science department. In part, it was just to give a guest lecture. You know, schools always have people come through. And do guest research talks that talked about the research that I do and stuff. But An explicit reason that they also said they wanted me to specifically to come out and visit was to talk to them about how they could improve the climate for women in their Department. So, this is something that every department of computer science in the nation is worrying about or should be worrying about. So, it’s not that only they have a problem, but but I think they recognize that their numbers are even more of a problem than A lot of other schools, and I was floored by how seriously they were taking that and how open they were. to even some very so I went into this meeting with I had kind of I played McKinsey as consultant in my mind, like, okay, here are all the different Action items that you could do to address this, starting with some maybe more minor or easy to implement, or even sort of cosmetic things. down through radical structural change. And I was ready to kind of feel the room and see what I thought they were ready for. And before I left, I had given them the entire list. I was very surprised by how open they were. And not just a few people in the department, but the entire department leadership. in how committed they were to working on this. So someone in the church, and it seems like quite a few people are very interested in seeing this change. So

Cynthia Bailey Lee

I g well, the State Presidency would like me to repeat it often, I think. Um I I’ve been the limiting factor on this. We’ve talked about even doing maybe um several days kind of summer camp thing or different things. But yeah, th they’ve been very, very enthusiastic. So after we do the we do the lesson about the colors, which is just in the slides, and then we do the bracelets and talk about ASCII And then after that, I lead them through, and I actually use the Khan Academy lessons in JavaScript. And so Partly that’s the other reason you can absolutely do this, even if you don’t do coding, is that you just get the kids onto Khan Academy, and there’s a little virtual tutor. Like, do you remember the little paper clip that was in Microsoft when I was okay? But it’s a much more advanced version of that that’s not annoying and works well. And so it’ll jump in and provide a little bit of the teaching for you, actually a lot of the teaching for You because it’s designed to be for kids, for parents to just put their kids at home on the computer and with no supervision to do these lessons. So they don’t need your supervision. So you can absolutely do this lesson, even if you don’t know coding. And it helps just to provide some motivation and excitement of the room. If you’re at the front of the room Showing on a projector, stepping through some of the steps of the lesson. But you step through the steps of the lesson yourself at home before, and then that tutor will be teaching you. And then, when you do it in the room, you don’t have to worry that if they do something wrong and ask you a question, you’re not going to be able to answer the question because the system actually answers the question. The little character, it’s actually Hopper for Grace Hopper, who is our patron saint of women in computer science.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

You should all go Google Grace Hopper if you don’t know who she is. So it’s a little squeaky character, but the name is Hopper. Anyway, so it will pop up and say, it looks like you forgot to put a comma here or something. So you, as the facilitator, don’t need to know all that stuff. No, but that would be an excellent idea. And it’s something that industry has certainly noticed the potential of women who either are empty nest or empty nested that the kids are now in kindergarten and feel like they want to start a second career. So you have all these boot camps like Hackbright and other things that are focused on retraining women. I think we have a Hackbright graduate in the room. So So it’s absolutely a phenomenon that the industry has noticed that this would be one resource where they could meet some of this unmet demand. It’s not something that I’ve done for women in the church setting, but that’s actually Really good idea. I am organizing a road talk for the

Speaker 3

But the I haven’t heard everything about girls wanting to do something I’ve heard a lot of complaints about how they don’t think voting is creative, but not so much about the technical thing, maybe for low-income women struggling to survive in their own city. Interesting.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Well, so the research shows that this oh, we’re sorry, repeat the question. The question is: she’s running adult women workshops in the tenderloin. And wondering about this research that I quoted saying that girls are motivated by this altruism um instinct or motive and um whether that would equally speak to women who are themselves on um living on the edge of poverty or um whether they really have the bandwidth to worry about that. And um and I would guess no. Um the research that I’ve seen about the altruism is specifically speaking to the Middle school, high school age. So you can certainly imagine why that would be a less complicated interest for them because at that point other people are taking care of you, ideally. So certainly for adult women who do spend so much of their time being a mom or helping other people or just trying to take care of themselves, I imagine that would not be as powerful. You can run this in your stake.

Cynthia Bailey Lee

And the great thing about this is that you you touch a few people and then they touch more, and then they go to back to their schools and they show their friends their bracelet and they touch more. So we just need a few people to start this, to really start To change a much broader audience.

Speaker 3

So you’re not going to change the world, are they everything that is in common with this?

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Yeah, so the first thing they do, they pair up one-on-one, and the first thing they do is show the girls how to make a bracelet. and then they go and teach them. They don’t create the whole image that I showed. The young women create that in my lesson. And then they teach the girls how to make modifications to it. It. So they’ll just in the interest of time, they will say, Do you see this line here? This is what makes the circle for the left eye. And so we can change this number and that will make it wider or taller or change the color. So um they’re still learning many of the key concepts, but not quite from us starting from zero, um making modifications. To the existing thing. But basically, they go through all the same content talking points that the young women do.

Speaker 3

What is the youngest age that you can start introducing to us to tell them?

Cynthia Bailey Lee

So there’s not with JavaScript. The thing about JavaScript is that you have to be able to type. Because you’re typing in the text of the code. And not only do you have to be able to type, but you have to be able to hold down a shift key and another key at the same time, which I tried to teach my kids. ‘Cause I’m crazy. Of course I would to code w you know, when they were like five. And they had learned a little bit of typing at school. But what I learned is that they couldn’t they basically could only do lowercase because the extra dexterity required For that, is but that really is the barrier: the kind of keyboard manipulation skills and not the cognitive skills for the level of coding that we should In this, there are other languages that are drag and drop. So, Scratch is one. If you go to scratch. org, it’s a language that requires no typing, just clicking with the mouse. And that’s designed for kids. Probably, you know, if you’re, they’re not going to enjoy it if you start them at four, so wait till they’re five. And then I was going to say four, but you know, there’s like an age where you could force them to do something, but so from about five through Maybe end of elementary school. And then I would say from about eight through any age, really, this Khan Academy JavaScript is good. And if you’re talking about later high school ages, there’s the MIT app inventor lets you make Android apps if you trust your kid with a smartphone. You have enough money to buy your kid a smartphone, that’s something you could do. Actually,

Cynthia Bailey Lee

Do you brother who runs the resources of how to teach people to code? Okay, so she has the best website ever. You can go up to her and get the URL if you want to teach kids how to code. which is a list of all the things that I just mentioned and a bunch of other resources for teaching different age levels, interests, how to code.

Speaker 1

Cynthia Vailly Lee.