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Programmer Father Asks: What Gets Little Girls Interested In Science?
nbauman writes Programmer David Auerbach is dismayed that, at a critical developmental age, his 4-year-old daughter wants to be a princess, not a scientist or engineer, he writes in Slate. The larger society keeps forcing sexist stereotypes on her, in every book and toy store. From the article: "Getting more women into science and technology fields: Where’s the silver bullet? While I might get more hits by revealing the One Simple Trick to increase female participation in the sciences, the truth is there isn’t some key inflection point where young women’s involvement drops off. Instead, there is a series of small- to medium-sized discouraging factors that set in from a young age, ranging from unhelpful social conditioning to a lack of role models to unconscious bias to very conscious bias. Any and all of these can figure into why, for example, women tend to underrate their technical abilities relative to men. I know plenty of successful women in the sciences, but let’s not fool ourselves and say the playing field in the academic sciences or the tech world is even. My wife attributes her pursuit of programming to being a loner and pretty much ignoring wider society while growing up: 'Being left alone with a computer (with NO INTERNET TO TELL ME WHAT I COULDN’T DO) was the deciding factor,' she tells me."
Growing up, we had Commodore 64s, Atari 800s, and Tandy Color Computers to interest us.
This would be, by far, the best money you could spend.
http://amzn.to/1yREUVd
This single handedly made me fall in love with logic, design, and creative problem solving.
In seeming contrast to all these articles about how women have to conform to male culture to make it as programmers, at work our technical lead is pretty much the girliest women I've ever met. Like, every single stereotype, from being terrified of insects ("eep, someone kill this thing!") to wearing actual bows in her hair.
And she's not in that role to round out some diversity quota, she's there because she has some serious technical skills and the pragmatism required to actually get the damn thing out the door while still being a solid product.
I'm all for removing artificial barriers, but once they are down we're gonna have to accept that maybe girls really do want to be princesses and maybe guys really do want to be monster trucks (not drive, be damnit, BE!)
Sure... once they're all down you will see differences. But they have never all been down.
Fundamentally, unless you have a significant community that actively tries to not focus on girl things with girls and guy things with guys, including training for parents who are dedicated to it, you're not going to escape your culture's gender norms. You can limit their influence, but they're still there. There are *trillions* of dollars of material and millenia of cultural inertia behind and imbued with those norms.
But there are traits that are admirable in the norms of both genders, and the trick is getting kids interested in those things. Experimenting, inventing, exploring, building things, designing things, social graces--there are lots of important traits, things it's good to bring out. Find a few parents who think the same way you do and try to set up activities around those things. Like lesson plans.
Also, look at parenting groups. Maybe even reach out through your college alumni networks to see what people from your school have done. I'm sure there are lots of parents around the country who wonder about this.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazett...
It's biological and it probably goes way back to our common ancestor.
More monkey business:
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
tl;dr Females seem to like all toys, males avoid "girly" toys.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... is the responsibility of parents. If you want your kid to be an engineer or a scientist then you don't let them self direct outside of that box. You very deliberately encourage certain pursuits.
You have every right to do this as a parent. You do it by imposing your culture on the child. Parents have every right and even responsibility to impose a framework on the child. The alternative is to let the television do it. The television will impose a framework without hesitation or remorse. Do not give it that opportunity. Impose your own programming before it can try.
Here someone will say I am not respecting the freedom of the child. The child is genetically programmed to imprint on adults. If I do not assist this imprinting process then the child will track on the first thing that responds properly. Think of ducks that imprint on humans. The point is that the child will be imprinted regardless. It is a zero sum game. If your child did not adopt the cultural view you prefer then you failed to imprint the child properly.
Doing this properly in the 21st century requires some intelligence, love, patience, and knowledge of human psychology.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So contrary to you, I strongly believe based on the evidence around me, that the U.S. way of predetermining the roles of girls and boys in life in the U.S. culture and especially in toys and stories aimed at children plays a very important role in the roles they actually play in their later life. And it could be different, but in the current environment, where the actual buyers of those toys and story books are already predetermined by their own childhood, there is no business case in challenging the settings. Getting girls interested in being princesses works because the parents (and other grown up relatives) of the girls have the final say what they want their daughters to be interested in, and when they will agree that their daughter is so cute.
I've seen my own daughter playing with toy cars and toy trains as a very little child, because that were the toys her older brother played with. But then a family with two girls of her age moved into the neighborhood, and they had all the pink toys and castles and white play horses, and my daughter played with them and gradually wanted their own princess dolls and horses (she even started a collection of them), but this was several years ago, and now my daughter is in junior highschool. She chosed Robotics as her voluntary topic, she saved money to buy herself a PS4, and she's playing Second Son all the time - turning into a computer nerd like her father and much more than her older brother.
They way boys and girls play with cards and trains is different. My two nieces both played with the same toy car at their grandmas. But only my nephew picked it up turned it over and was fingering the wheels to see how they went around. This is the same car from the same box of toys so they all had the same options.
There was a BBC Horizon on is your brain male and female where they left toys in an ape enclosure at a safari park in the UK. I nearly fell of my seat when the male apes picked up the cars turned them over and where fingering the wheels in *EXACTLY* the same why my 9 month old nephew had done, but neither of my nieces had ever show any inclination to do when playing with the very same car. For reference the female apes in the program exclusively picked up "girl" toys.
There have been a number of experiments with apes of different species now and all have show dramatic gender preferences towards toys. True in some species/experiments (all the experiments seem to use different species of apes) the preference is restricted to the males, but in some species/experiments it is present in both females and males. Clearly the idea that toy selection in children is all down to social pressure is complete and total nonsense.
It will be interesting to see how my third niece who has an elder brother totally mad for trains behaves. So far she has spent 15 minutes watching a train go around a track aged five months. She was even pushing on her legs to get a better view as the train approached the side of the settee, and head following the train around and around. Big brother meanwhile was laid under the table on the floor also watching the train go around and under the table also totally mesmerized. The two elder nieces never got access to this toy because we thought it had been given away years ago till I found it in my mothers loft a month ago.
Even if you call the situation before a non-natural one, there is not a single reason to consider the situation afterwards in any way more natural.
150 years ago pink was a boy's colour, and blue was a girl's colour. Pink was seen as being close to red, kind of aggressive and exciting. Blue was seen as pale, gentle and soft like girls. Since 150 years is too short a time frame for genetic differences to account for this, the only reasonably conclusion is that it is social.
Similarly, in previous decades there were more women in IT. Around 2000 the numbers started to fall dramatically. Something changed, it can't simply be biological differences.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yes. I have. It's called the entire existence of marketing as a career and the fundamentals that market research is based on. Marketing is designed to appeal to peoples wants and desires to try to get them to buy what you want them to buy. Got that. The product must appeal to what the target demographic wants. It doesn't work so well when you go the other way. Design a product that is what you think somebody should want without consulting them, and then trying to get them to buy it is going to fail miserably. My eight year old niece, father an engineer, mother runs her own business, grandparents and uncles all in the sciences. We pull out all the fun science experiments, take her to museums and zoos. She doesn't watch TV, her parents don't allow it. Put her down in front of her brothers "circuit kit" with some basic electronic components and she says it's kind of cool, but boring for the most part. Give her some fairies and she's ecstatic. She's a smart kid, she's good at math, she understands the simple physics and chemistry being taught to her, she's home schooled, so you can't even claim it's the teachers ruining it for her, since her parents are very involved with educating her. She's not very interested in any of it despite being in quite possibly the perfect environment for being interested in the hard sciences.
It's one of the more interesting parts of the whole debate. In countries where women are considered the least repressed (Norway, Sweden, etc), and free to do what they want the most, those are the areas where you see girls going into "girly" careers (nursing, teaching). Go in to more repressed countries (India and China being the particularly famous ones) and you see women going into traditionally male careers more often. I'm an engineer. I work career fares. Almost every female who's qualified is either Indian or Chinese. It really does seem to be the more empowered a woman is, the more likely she is to go into a field she enjoys and then conform to stereotypical gender roles. The more repressed she is, the more likely she is to rebel against society and do a job which is a "mens field".
Am I an academic who has studied this at length? No. I'm simply an engineer who hates working in a sausage fest, who works for a company that due to the nature of our work, can only hire citizens. I works career fairs semi-regularly and have noticed that it's nearly impossible to hire women at our company because though it's not that rare to run into qualified female candidates, they all are from India or China, and I always feel really bad saying that I can take their resume if they'd like, but they're not likely to get a callback due to the citizenship requirement.
He's talking about 'encouraging' his daughter to be a scientist.
Why?
Because every other fucking slashdot story is about how "we need more women scientists"....a position developed and maintained entirely by meme, unsupported by facts.
Actually some data suggests that programmers, engineers, scientists tend to be a touch OCD about their preferences throughout life, leading them to prioritize these rather "hard" subjects over other things early on, other than, say, social development (thus the stereotype of nerd=science). Girls seem to prefer social development, thus, they tend not to direct to these fields unless highly motivated.
So the social pressure at work here is a father who thinks his daughter "ought" to be anything. Particularly at 4 - that's fucked up.
-Styopa
Have you been paying attention to GamerGate? It kinda looks like girls can't make video games or even write/talk about them without being threatened, due to the fact that they are the wrong gender. Some of the electronics boards I frequent are pretty bad too, constantly mocking girls who say they are interested in engineering. Tiffany Yep, for example.
There are nice parts of the internet. Adafruit has some good forums and YouTube videos where girls are welcome.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
When Queen Elizabeth II was just a "princess", she was doing automotive maintenance.
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Try as we do, we can't escape the reality that girls are not only physically different than boys, but as an aggregate group do lean towards certain behaviours and interests...
While that may be true, it does not fully account for the discrepancies we see in society.
I'm all for removing artificial barriers, but once they are down...
It isn't about barriers so much as it is about encouragement. Certainly, girls have access to all the same stuff boys do. But society encourages them toward different things. I didn't see this so much until I had 2 sons. Here are some examples:
- Buy a happy meal from McDonalds. They ask if you want the girl's toy or the boy's toy. The kids are being placed on a track very early.
- Watch some kids TV shows and compare:
- The number female scientists versus male scientists.
- Same with heroes and heroines.
- And athletes.
My 5-year-old son recently told me that girls like cute things and boys like science. He figured this out from watching G-rated movies, TV, and commercials. I try to review what he watches, but it is inevitable! I have peers with female children didn't even buy Mega Blocks, Duplo Blocks, or Legos for their daughters. Then when the girls turn 5 they declared that the kids just weren't interested in them. BS: they got doll houses, and my little ponies, and 2 cheezy "Lego Friends" sets.
It isn't just that girls may have a proclivity toward those things. They are actively steered toward them. Only after this is fixed can we make a reasonable judgement as to what natural tendencies the sexes have. But we have a long way to go before we get there.
My 4 y/o daughter loves making things, robots, planets, rockets and has an interest in biology. A couple months ago a friend showed her a new toy, she was all interested. She asked if he made it. He said no, she replied "awww" and immediately lost interest.
As a baby I took her to local maker meetings that met in a workshop where people showed off whatever projects they were working on. She used to just sit in her carrier and look around at all the tools, parts and stuff lying around. At that age with their brains developing as they are they pretty much soak up any sort of visual stimulation. Of course she had all the usual bright plastic or plush baby toys that most kids get to look at but she also had a machine shop! I quit taking her when she got a bit older and couldn't sit still and quiet for that long but I think it left an impression on her development.
Since she first learned to talk I have tried to answer all of her questions with how things really work. I try to explain it in a way that keeps it interesting too.
For example:
"why is it getting dark, why is it getting night?" Well... we live on a really really (arms held wide) big ball. See the sun over there? That's what makes it light. We don't feel it but it's spinning really really fast.You know how cars go really fast. Well.. that is nothing compared to how fast the Earth is spinning. See that house over there, see that tree. Those are big and look like they could never move. Well.. they are moving too but we don't see it because we are moving. Yup, we and everything around us is moving faster than even a car goes. Anyway.. you asked why it is getting dark. See the sun over there? As our ball, the Earth is spinning our side of it is turning away from the sun. We will be in the dark because the sun is on the other side of the ball. But.. you know what.. there are people on that side too. While we had our night they had their day. Now it's their turn and they will have day while we have night.
My Dad once heard me explaining something or other to her, I don't remember what and accused me of taking all of the magic out of it for her by removing the mystery or something like that. Really? If you really look at how the universe actually is what kind of kid story would be more fantastic than living on the skin of a giant ball flying at unimaginable speeds around a ball of fire that dwarfs even that? Living on the backs of turtles?
Answers like this will lead to many more questions. Keep answering. It's hard to tell what you will end up talking about before it is over. It's kind of like getting sucked into Wikipedia.
Use the internet. I like to show her pictures of the things I explain to her. Often we would end up sitting together at the computer and I would search Google images for whatever we were talking about. When she started showing an interest in planets I showed them to her using Celestia too. Now she asks to "go look at planets" but what she really means is go look at pictures on the internet. She will tell me what she wants to see pictures of, planets, robots, cells and I will show them to her. She loves videos too so long as there are short and preferably animated. Here's one she really loves http://youtu.be/B_zD3NxSsD8.
Speaking of watching things, we watch a lot of Phineas and Ferb. I also made a DVD for her with videos I downloaded from Youtube. She can watch it when she is not with me and she loves it! It is a mix of space and electronics stuff. The space part takes a historical arc, it starts with a Saturn V launch is one track then videos of the first moon landing then splashdown, a shuttle launch, an iss docking, a shuttle landing. I edited each video to keep them short. Gotta remember, kids attention span. In between each is something that is not space, I don't remember what all I used, I know Adafruits Circuit Playground is part of it.
Speaking of Circuit Playground, she loves it! I though it would be too che
Newborns don't show preferences for anything at all. Hell, feeding them is a chore.
My toddler seems to be interested in a mix of girly and boy things. When she was six months she started trying to take evereything apart and very obviously wanted to know how they worked, an engineering mindset. It's anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but almost (not all, but all but one) every parent I've spoken to that has taken on a policy of letting the child steer them in his or her interests has seen their child have a mix of interests until they mix with other children, where peer pressure starts to apply.
And of course, there's that whole pink/blue thing that is a modern invention. Hard to explain that.
Nobody in their right mind would argue that girls will never be drawn to certain interests more frequently than boys and vice versa, but it's hard to see why science and engineering would be amongst those affected by this without heavy peer pressure. Girls are no less curious than boys. What is science but the ultimate embodiment of curiousity?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.