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Gender Equality: Exploring Aesthetic Programming as a Way to Increase Diversity and Shape Inclusivity in Our Digital Society

Women are still globally under-represented in IT. Despite efforts over the last twenty years to narrow the gender gap in STEM education, a large imbalance still persists in many countries throughout the world. This paper discusses the current global gender gap in STEM. It presents an initial study with a range of primary school pupils in Wales, UK that explored a new mode of aesthetic problem solving in order to teach programming. The findings show that this aesthetic approach was successful in engaging all genders in programming. The approach not only introduced programming practically and creatively but also highlighted the importance of the problem being solved and around this cultivating an open space for pupils to discuss, reflect and grow a gender-neutral computational culture. Indeed, to create an equitable digital society, we need to break down the existing barriers and find new ways to tackle the STEM gender gap in order to build a stronger and a fairer digital world.