a report of The Pluto Institute
On the eve of the April 25th national event, Take Our Daughters To Work® which has the over 85% name recognition by the American public, The Pluto Institute has released a white paper on Daughters and the Digital Revolution.
To track and record Daughters' participation(all girls and young women are daughters of someone reasons Valencia Guerrero, herself a daughter and President of The Pluto Institute) in the Digital Revolution, The Pluto Institute developed tests for six levels. These were administered to preschool, first grade, fifth grade, eighth grade, 11th grade, and college sophomores. Over 140,000 daughters participated in the study.
The Pluto Institute's chief finding was that performance and understanding of digital phenomena was uniform in all six categories. In other words, the same percentage (88%) of daughters recognized and understood digital media concepts at every level.
The Pluto Institute's second chief finding demonstrates that over 78% of daughters in every category fully understood the questions posed; answered appropriately; showed no fear of technology; and expressed interest in learning more about digital worlds. Over 62% also questioned the examiners thoroughly about their jobs, their motivations, their criteria in testing, and their overall job satisfaction.
The examiners collecting the information uniformly felt (95.4%) that in fact the daughters had also interviewed them and used the so-called study of daughters to collect information on the testing system itself and its administrators. (The daughters' findings will be published in a different study in June 1996.)
Daughters at every level were asked if they understood what digital information was. Even preschoolers would frequently (74%) mark x and o for on and off with crayons from their art areas. Daughters in all groups understood that information in many different media such as film, sound, animation, video and text could be rendered digitally and that digital rendering allowed new avenues of transport beyond former means.
Daughters did, however, vary in their assessment of business models for the digital revolution. Those in the three upper age categories all questioned the model of the American Corporation, citing it's ungodly cumbersomeness, slow decision making and lack of daughters in its ranks, as real impediments to the quick decision making required by lightning changes in technology.
The younger three groups of girls didn't even bother discussing the corporation as an agent of change. They mostly developed models by rearranging the desks in their classrooms into small team clusters with four different chair groups marked by colored labels. They then moved the chairs around for each project, and thus demonstrated how different people would assume leadership roles at different times in a project. They definitely showed an anti-hierarchical attitude which even extended into the lunchroom where they, once again, uniformly (84%) ate dessert first.
Daughters and the Digital Revolutions Report offers the following conclusions:
{Home}
{Nerdboys}
{NewStory}
{Women}
{Maine}
{Painting}
{Sherry}
{Nanowackology}
{Guilt}
{Advice}
{Pluto Institute}