These are the selling points for CS that worked really well in my conversations with 10-18 year-old girls so far (Aggregated so you can use them for your niece if you find the opportunity) :
- You can do this really cool thing you wanted to do (ex: build a cringe Justin Bieber /cringe fan app ) and it's easy, let me show you how.
- This girl who was just like you is now heading Yahoo/building the top fan site for XYZ band.
- You can make something that millions of people are sharing and using tomorrow and you don't have to ask your parents for money to do it.
- You can make more money as a teenager building stuff in a day than did the average worker in my country in a month.
- You can work from a tropical island if you want, or anywhere on the planet, really.
- The quality of your work can be proven immediately and the duration of your experience shows in the size of your portfolio, so every hour you make things they can help you in perpetuity (no way to get that as a teacher, nurse, or model).
- You can graduate college in the US in one of the worst years for immigrants ('07), with no visas available, and still get multiple job offers at companies of your choice because of the point above.
- The jobs are growing, not shrinking in this industry. It is a new form of literacy you will need to know eventually.
- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.
Great list and answer to PG's recent question of how do you get thirteen year old girls interested in programming. Another of my favorite quotes from a high-school girl on this topic [1]:
“Before taking the mandated Intro class last year, when I heard ‘computer science,’ I pictured nerdy boys, who turned into nerdy bearded men, slouched over huge computers and click-clacking out codes that meant nothing to me. There’s nothing wrong with nerdy boys, comp sci just didn’t seem like something I would ever be interested in.
“This image was quickly shattered in that first intro class. Computer science started to resonate with me when I worked on my first project, creating a simple animation of a string quartet using Netlogo. It was while I was working on this that I realized comp sci isn’t about nerdy boys sitting at computers and coding out nonsense that turns into violent video games and complicated math problem solvers. No, comp sci isn’t this at all. Comp sci, as I have found in my classes at Stuy, is a medium for expression, a place for creation and creativity.”
That's equally applicable to both genders.
Also, what do you think of John McCarthy's statement in the article also on the frontpage right now [2]:
" It has been my observation that the dropout from hard science by girls in high school is not primarily the fault of either parents or school. It is much more the fault of the values of present teen-age-girl society. Both boys and girls are affected more by the ideas of their peers than by the official policies of the educational institutions. A disproportionate number of adults with initiative come from separatist social groups where the parents prevent children from taking their values from their peers or from the schools.
Getting more women in higher positions in society depends on breaking this tradition. One possibility is batch processing rather than continuous operation. Normally a school is a continuous institution. Freshmen come in at the bottom and seniors go out at the top. If the tradition is regarded as bad, we could experiment with a system wherein a particular school is filled with freshmen and no new ones are admitted until the first lot graduates. If a new desirable tradition is successfully inculcated, then continuous processing can be resumed. This idea might also work in prisons. Another possibility is to teach initiative directly."
Also, regarding the recommendations to post to reddit, ignore them. HN is a smaller audience, but more specific and relevant to your post, and I'm glad you posted here instead, since I for one don't subscribe to /r/AMA or /r/IAMA (or whatever) and never would have seen it. By all means feel free to cross-post it there, but I suspect it will get a better reception here.
- You can do this really cool thing you wanted to do (ex: build a cringe Justin Bieber /cringe fan app ) and it's easy, let me show you how.
- This girl who was just like you is now heading Yahoo/building the top fan site for XYZ band.
- You can make something that millions of people are sharing and using tomorrow and you don't have to ask your parents for money to do it.
- You can make more money as a teenager building stuff in a day than did the average worker in my country in a month.
- You can work from a tropical island if you want, or anywhere on the planet, really.
- The quality of your work can be proven immediately and the duration of your experience shows in the size of your portfolio, so every hour you make things they can help you in perpetuity (no way to get that as a teacher, nurse, or model).
- You can graduate college in the US in one of the worst years for immigrants ('07), with no visas available, and still get multiple job offers at companies of your choice because of the point above.
- The jobs are growing, not shrinking in this industry. It is a new form of literacy you will need to know eventually.
- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.