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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."
We get to be movers, firemen, security guards and soldiers.
THE HUMANITY!
Oh, wait - and 95% of the Fortune 500 CEOs. And still in dozens of countries, the only gender allowed to go to school and walk openly on the street. Yes, we men are SO oppressed in today's society...
It is a bit rich to talk of a natural distribution in the population of girls. How would we observe it when there is a systematic bias towards pink and fluffy in every toy and media aimed at girls? All you have really stated is that given a bias towards X in our sample, we have observed a tendency to pick X. That is not a conclusion that I would be proud of, and it mirrors the opening paragraphs of TFA.
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True indeed, she needs a father with balls, which evidently he has not to post this shit. And yeah, I am not hiding behind an anonymous post. If this post was about a boy, it would be deemed sexist, and frankly, WHY NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND? Fuck, you ruined my morning.