I found this article about how girls are generally outpacing boys in Internet content creation interesting. I used some of the stats from the Pew study in a presentation a few years ago. I do think there’s a disconnect somewhere in that girls’ interest in blogging, creating web pages, podcasting, etc. often doesn’t translate into learning C++ or PHP or doing software development. I’m not sure if I could have been hooked, for example, if blogging had existed 20 years ago. But maybe. I was frustrated by having to tediously tinker with code that ultimately didn’t produce anything useful or fun. Maybe if I could have created applets or widgets, I might have been more inspired. I don’t know.

I also am struck by how the activities that girls do participate in is almost immediately devalued. Their activities are only good, the article seems to imply at times, if it leads to harder science. It’ll be interesting to see where we are in about 15-20 years when these teenage girls start choosing careers.