Lessons I've Learned in 22 Years of Working with Teachers About Girls in IT

In the late 1970´s and early 1980´s, Sylvia Kramer was a gifted, visionary 5th grade teacher and the Title IX compliance officer for the Great Neck Public Schools on Long Island, New York. Great Neck was, and is, an upper-income community, and as such was one of the first school districts in the country to buy computers for its students. As a feminist, Sylvia noticed something other teachers didn't: nearly always it was the boys who took advantage of the opportunity to use the Commodore PET computers, the TRS-80 computers, and the Apple II computers. (Remember those? Remember how the 64K Apple IIe in 1983 was a marvel of progress?) When she became the executive director of Women's Action Alliance in New York, she immediately wrote a proposal about sex bias, as we called it then, in children's computer use to the Women's
Educational Equity Act Program in what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. They funded it. She started looking for someone to run it.