Programming girlhood: digital labor and the twenty-first century girl coder in the United States

ABSTRACT

There has been a marked rise in U.S. clubs and television programs promoting coding for young girls. These clubs and television shows position girls as either benefiting economically through the figure of the “can-do girl” or potentially failing as an “at-risk girl.” This article looks at two iterations of the girl coder – in Nickelodeon’s 2015 sitcom Game Shakers and in the rhetoric of Black Girl CODE and Girls Who Code – placing them within broader understandings of girlhood, economics, race, and labor. This analysis reveals the ways in which girl programmers become attached to racialized economic imaginings in these two instances either as idealized white child workers in the case of Game Shakers or future Black computer scientists within coding clubs. This positioning intimately ties girl programmers to economics, labor, and neoliberal ideals; however, this paper proposes that we need to imagine other possible goals for the girl programmer, particularly for Black and Brown girls.

IMPACT SUMMARY

a. Prior State of Knowledge: Since 2010 there has been a push to get girls into computer coding with particular attention paid to the pipeline problem. This rhetoric has been both touted and questioned.

b. Novel Contributions: This article adds a critical look at how Black and Brown girls are positioned within computer programming initiatives and discourses using two primary case studies. It then offers a non-future oriented way of considering computer coding for girls.

c. Practical Implications: This project suggests that researchers must continue to pay attention to the nuances of raced neoliberal capitalism in studies on girl’s media even as initiatives are widely considered positive.

KEYWORDS:

• Girl
• programming
• coding
• neoliberalism
• race
• digital economy
• digital labor
• futurity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For clarity, I use “Game Shakers” (in italics) to refer to the television show itself and “Game Shakers” (non-italics) to refer to the company formed by Babe and Kenzie. In the sections working directly with Game Shakers, italics are used to denote game titles (Tiny Pickles) and quotation marks for episode titles (“Tiny Pickles”).

2. According to researchers, this is particularly noticeable because girls’ participation in other areas of science and engineering have remained steady or grown (National Science Foundation, 2018).

3. Nickelodeon U.K. also launched a coding application called Code-It in 2015 which developers described as expanding coding learned in schools by making it fun. The Code-It app allows users to create “action trees” and “action stacks” to animate Nickelodeon characters and the worlds they inhabit. Nickelodeon U.S., Asia, and Australia have a less complicated application entitled Code A Character which allows players to code Sponge Bob or Sky Whale from a set of pre-selected choices.

4. Margolis’s (2008) book length study on Los Angeles shows that segregation and inequality infiltrate the ways in which computer science is conceived and taught in schools with varying populations. They also articulate that certain students are encouraged to take computer science classes while others are not (particularly Black students).

5. Projansky is borrowing from Anita Harris’s (2004) original work on the can-do and at-risk girl.

6. After the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002, student testing in core academic areas became a requirement in grades 3–8 and tied school funding to the achievement of all students. Schools not performing at Adequate Yearly Progress for multiple years faced serious sanctions including reallocation of funds and state intervention Klein, 2015. One result of NCLB was more regulation of the physical body of the child as it became sequestered in classrooms for longer hours without a break for free play.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brittney Knotts

Brittney Knotts is a PhD candidate in English Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She works at the intersections of girlhood media, political economy, and education. Her current research takes an ethnographic approach to girls’ coding spaces, considering what happens outside the realm of future-facing goals.