Girls Byte Back

By Rachel Hartigan

Drive south from San Francisco down El Camino Real. Gas stations, fast food restaurants, motels, car dealerships-you could be anywhere. But turn left on Rengstorff Avenue in the town of Mountain View and left again into the parking lot of the Girls' Middle School, get out of your car, and walk into the office of Kathleen Bennett. There, you'll find the first tangible sign that you are in California's famed Silicon Valley. Though Bennett holds the decidedly low-tech position of school director, two computers sit on her desk, each busily humming.

Bennett opened GMS, a private school, last fall. Bankrolled by technology moguls and backed by some of the computer industry's top women thinkers, she aims to challenge girls with math, science, and technology while also tending to their emotional needs. A former social studies teacher who left the classroom for a career in computers, Bennett had long dreamed of opening such a school. Girls, she contends, lose ground academically in the middle school years as they become more concerned about being popular than about being smart. GMS, Bennett hopes, will be a place where girls won't feel limited by what they think is feminine, where they'll learn how to take apart a bike as well as to read, write, and do arithmetic. Above all, she is striving to create what she calls a "tinkering environment" where girls figure out how things work on their own.

Such a school is hardly new. Single-sex education has been a popular remedy in the '90s for all manner of education's ills. What's original in Bennett's girl-centric vision is the tool that she is counting on to empower her students: the computer, the ultimate toy for boys. After more than 15 years of working in the testosterone-soaked computer industry, she firmly believes that technology is a boys' club. And with 12 other entrepreneurs, educators, and scholars, she's been asked by the American Association of University Women to find out why that club exists and how to help...