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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."
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.
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.