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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.
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."
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.
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.
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.