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."

Comments

Yeesh

[Anonymous Coward]

This is practically a troll.

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.

Some of it may be learned, and there are of course outliers, but you see similar behaviour tied to gender across very different and sometimes geographically isolated cultures. In the least technical terms, there really are "girl things" and "guy things". This becomes rediculously obvious to anyone who has spent any time around little kids.

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!)

I really doubt this guys daughter is deciding to be a princess because she feels society has limited her career choices. She wants to be a princess because that's the kind of thing little girls lean towards. If she wants to play with lego, by all means encourage that shit, but if she just wants to dress up and play with doll, let her play with her dolls and leave her alone!

Re:Yeesh

[Anonymous Coward]

But if he gets an answer, get back to me so I can try and apply it to my g/fs 13 year old son that wants to be a princess.

Re:Yeesh

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever consider girls don't like girly things cause there marketed towards them, but rather, that girly things are marketed to girls cause thats there tried and true demographic? There's a chance that the marketers paid lots of money to figure out what girls and boys will get there parents to buy them might actually know there demographics. Like someone above said, I'm all about giving girls the ability to go for boy things, but trying to force them into it is going to be damaging and counter productive. Would you be disappointed in your child if they were into stereotypical things?

Re:Yeesh

[epyT-R]

How so? Feminists are always talking about natural distributions of behavior in boys and men, usually when the behavior is considered negative (even when it's normal and healthy). It's a bit rich to assume that the bias towards pink and fluffy is systematic and not just a normal response in females stemming from innate biological differences.

Re:Yeesh

[Etherwalk]

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.

Re:Yeesh

[Merls the Sneaky]

http://news.harvard.edu/gazett...
It's biological and it probably goes way back to our common ancestor.

Re:Yeesh

[tlambert]

How would we observe it when there is a systematic bias towards pink and fluffy in every toy and media aimed at girls?

Just because a toy is aimed at girls, doesn't mean a parent has to pull the trigger on the toy and fire it at their daughter. Who put Hasbro's marketing department in charge of raising our children in the first place? Oh yeah, the parents.

Re:Yeesh

[Hognoxious]

More monkey business:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

tl;dr Females seem to like all toys, males avoid "girly" toys.

Re:Yeesh

[smallfries]

What feminists argue really has no bearing on anything. It would be a bit rich to assume that a bias in females was systematic, but then again that is not what I said. I said that the stimulus presented to that group was systematically biased, as a result of which we cannot say anything at all about bias in that group. Certainly we can't the type of conclusions that the OP was extracting from his butt.

Re:Yeesh

[smallfries]

That press release says that a bunch of anthropologists have seen something that may possibly look like innate behaviour. That is strong enough for you to declare that it is biological? I am guessing that you do not do this for a living.

Re:Yeesh

[smallfries]

Ever consider girls don't like girly things cause there marketed towards them, but rather, that girly things are marketed to girls cause thats there tried and true demographic?

Yes we all indulge in speculation. Have you ever encountered any evidence that it is true?

Re:Yeesh

[jandersen]

This is practically a troll.

Not really - what you say seems thoughtful and balanced to my eye.

But to answer the fellow's question - what makes girls interested in science is the same that makes anybody else interested: the feeling of understanding an exciting subject. One has to keep in mind - and accept - that not everybody will find it interesting, though. That said, the worst thing one can do to anybody's interest is push them; that will almost inevitably lead to feelings of failure and teach them that science is the one thing they hate. It's the same for all subjects, really; I have seen often enough how parents force their children to play the violin or piano, and they end up detesting it.

If you really want your daughter to become interested in science, let her understand that the only thing you want for her is that she chooses what shereally likes, and that you trust her own judgement in this. Most children are naturally interested in learning new things and in asking questions. Also, you have to realise that ALL questions are valid and should be answered to your best ability - and if you don't know the answer, show her how to find it for herself. That may be the most important part - after all, science is not about knowing everything, but about finding out.

Re:Yeesh

[Sique]

I've grown up in an environment with not so much focus on "girlish" and "boyish" toys, and -- ta da! -- we didn't have this extreme separation of genders. Still today, when I see especially U.S. TV series aimed at children and adolescents, I often have an urge to switch off the TV because the settings seem to be so completely off reality and so loaden with cliché. There are some dogmata deeply ingrained in the plots, which are never questioned, and which play their own role as if they were real objects. Adolescent girls dream of marriage and boys want sex. It's a recurring theme everywhere in U.S. TV and so totally off anything I experienced myself. But I've yet to see the plot where this dogma is actually challenged. Maths and computers are a boy thing. In East Germany, computer science was a topic which had about 50/50 students. After 1989, the female student numbers fell dramatically. But at the mid level of the universities, all those women which started their academical career before 1989, still were present.

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.

Re:Yeesh

[hweimer]

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

That's the naturalistic fallacy right there. Little kids really want all sorts of things (like lots of candy, for instance), but this doesn't mean that it's a good idea to let them have their way. If the parents believe that their kid shows a behavior that could lead to a disadvantage later in life, then they have to take action. It's called parenting, by the way.

Re:Yeesh

[jabuzz]

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.

Re:Yeesh

[nctritech]

http://www.psychologytoday.com...
http://www.parenting.com/artic...
Also, a documentary that examines and discusses the subject in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Yeesh

[Sique]

He doesn't provide any evidence at all, just presents the current situation as some kind of natural state, which I doubt because I don't experience it as natural, but as a result of generations of propaganda. You might not notice this particular propaganda, because you grew up within without it ever being called so, but I do. I see U.S. movies, and I see movies produced in Europe, and sometimes I see movies produced in Asia. Only the U.S. movies have this strong accent on girls being princesses, on boys being rock musicians, and only in U.S. movies you will find the father "talking the talk" to his son about those mysterious women, and the mother warning the daughter about the boys only wanting sex. Only in U.S. movies I see those strong and unquestioned clichés how to be a man and how to be a woman. To me, they are a typical part of the U.S. culture. There is no evidence whatsoever that the dichotomy between boys and girls in topics to pursuit as a student is in some way a natural one, which cannot and will never be changed. I've seen the topics to pursuit change when the cultural environment changed. And this is more than "anecdotical" evidence, as it affects hundred of thousands of students. We actually had an experiment, and the experiment showed that within a few years, between 1989 and 1994, the ratio of males to females changed completely from a 50/50 ratio to a 50/1 ratio.

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.

Re:Yeesh

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Yeesh

[Kariles70]

Why of course! Only female brains are smaller in physical size but with more neurons closer together than a male brain and they tend to be receiving a far different chemical cocktail of hormones than a male brain. They mature earlier than a male's brain and are effected more by what they hear than what they see and vice versa for a male. They are aroused by very different things than a male brain, they interpret data, particularly spatial recognition differently, have more olfactory nerves than a male, and a whole host of other things that are very different. But other than that they are exactly the same.

Don't bother with a course in anatomy & physiology. You'd fail it due to your politics preventing you from learning.

Re:Yeesh

[AmiMoJo]

It's worth pointing out that animals have societies too, and social pressures. Anyone who owns a cat knows this, because despite in theory being a lower life form with a small brain they are actually quite masterful social manipulators. I'd be surprised if apes, who are known to have complex societies, were not influenced by each other from a very young age.

Re:Yeesh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yeesh

[trewornan]

Typical SJW if you disagree with him you're a fathead who doesn't know anything about the subject and should just STFU. The only thing that surprises me about this PC loser is he didn't say "check your privilege". Come on AC, report me for "abusive" posting - trying to silence any dissenting opinion is the modern feminists movements stock in trade.

Re:Yeesh

[dywolf]

and why is it a tried and true demograpic?
its completely cultural in nature and is comprised of a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

the notion that it is AT ALL biological is rooted in ignorance.
Ignorance of biology, ignorance of culture, and ignorance of history.

Consider that when pink first took on gender connotations, it was originally considered a manly color, while women wore white or blue as they wee more "feminine".
in fact the gender associations of colors has changed many times over history, and varied much across various cultures.

Re:Yeesh

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Exactly let the kids be kids just be sure to expose them to lots of different things. My youngest has proudly stated that he loves everything that is pink and purple because those are the best colors in the whole wide world. Then he will play monster trucks and run over his hot wheels cars with his monster trucks. The last time we were at the Lego store he insisted that he get an entire cup of pink and purple Legos instead of like his older brother who wanted the more interesting pieces from the wall of parts. Both of them do like playing kitchen even if all of those toys are done with lots of pinks and purples and the oldest one when he went into kindergarten would often play house with the girls in his class but he was the cook.

Re:Yeesh

[NotDrWho]

Even in isolated tribes in the Amazon who've been cut off from the world for centuries and have never seen "Western patriarchy" or a single pink princess outfit, women and girls still tend to take on nurturing and homemaking roles while the men hunt and gather.

Re:Yeesh

[Bigbutt]

I didn't realize there was a "men's" chess league. Why is there a "woman's" chess league?

[John]

Re:Yeesh

[MobyDisk]

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.

Re:Yeesh

[smallfries]

Interesting material. I skipped the video but I dug out the original article. The experiment design is neat and seems to show a clear preference, but there is something a little odd about it. Why is the red pan (wholly inanimate and very culturally dependent) more popular with the female sample than the doll? This does water down the hypothesis that the authors loosely sound out in the discussion than it is the animate / inanimate distinction that provides an explanation for the differentiated interest. Nice experiment, it seems to have been cited heavily - has anybody achieved sharper results.

Re:Yeesh

[squiggleslash]

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?

Re:Yeesh

[dywolf]

i never said society is evil nor did i say that men and women are not different biologically.
and it does rather well prove that the societal attitutdes towards colors very much are results of society rather than biology.
the key is that those difference do not extend to our brains.

you get a fail for reading comprehension and logic.
and you should probably start here, which has a few good references to actual research on this subject: http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Re:Yeesh

[jeffmeden]

Ever consider girls don't like girly things cause there marketed towards them, but rather, that girly things are marketed to girls cause thats there tried and true demographic? There's a chance that the marketers paid lots of money to figure out what girls and boys will get there parents to buy them might actually know there demographics. Like someone above said, I'm all about giving girls the ability to go for boy things, but trying to force them into it is going to be damaging and counter productive. Would you be disappointed in your child if they were into stereotypical things?

Nope and nope. You have a woefully optimistic view of what "marketing" means at big companies. They market what they are making, and only the tiniest bit of feedback from marketing goes to the design process (usually in the form of "change this a little bit so it looks newer vs last year's model") and the rest of "marketing" is really sales strategies and advertising. If every toy company used child behavior/psychology to drive product development they would all be making the same toy. Face it, from the time the 3 month old baby boy is in blue overalls and the 3 month old baby girl is in a pink dress, cultural bias has sunk its teeth in. The child had no hand in picking those clothes whatsoever.

Re:Yeesh

[popo]

The women in the world chess league don't feel "safe" around male players. Those muscle-bound grandmasters are so prone to roid-rage and aggression these days that women need a "safe space" where they can play chess in a separate but equal arena with no patriarchy -- and one where women are guaranteed to win. ...Also, losing in chess may constitute rape in some states, so it's important to separate them.

/ more sarc

Re:Yeesh

[phantomfive]

only in U.S. movies you will find....the mother warning the daughter about the boys only wanting sex

Wow, you need to get out more because you find that sort of thing in basically every culture I've encountered. It's not "only a US thing"

Re:Yeesh

[jeffmeden]

the notion that it is AT ALL biological is rooted in ignorance. Ignorance of biology ...

Men and women are biologically different. Stating that differences between the two can be biological in nature is not ignorance of biology. Asserting that any differences are absolutely not biological is ignorance of biology.

Consider that when pink first took on gender connotations,

Well doesn't that just prove that all differences between men and women are because evil society is forcing pink on women.

It proves that the idea that girls will like pink things (of which the majority of products aimed at girls or the parents of girls happens to be) by some innate genetic force is completely wrong. It proves that you are wrong if you think that society is a complete reflection of innate genetic differences.

Evil? You used that word. However the early bias has a pretty simple explanation: parents deeply want their kids to be unique and excellent compared to other kids. If you put a 3 month old baby boy and a 3 month old baby girl next to each other with a diaper on, you won't be able to tell the gender at all. What good is that when your son is supposed to be the best little boy ever?! And how dumb was that lady who said you had a pretty little baby!? Can't she see that your boy is handsome, not pretty? Better get him in some blue overalls with a tiny little newsie hat.

She's _4_

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus fucking christ, give it a break. Your kid is 4. Mine were still talking about being medieval knights at that age.

Re:She's _4_

[ShanghaiBill]

Jesus fucking christ, give it a break. Your kid is 4.

Indeed. Why can't she be both a princess and a scientist? Why can't engineers wear a tiara, nice gowns, and be feminine? I think the problem here is the dad's attitude, not the daughter's.

Re:She's _4_

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:She's _4_

[elfprince13]

Thankfully there are more options than "preppy preschool" and "melt brain on TV". Playing outside, reading, and construction toys are all pretty solid options.

Re:She's _4_

[Etherwalk]

+1.

A kid raised solely on TV and the average preschool isn't getting the necessary stimulus for good brain or character development.

Uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet doesn't tell people what they cannot do. Why is the most ridiculous statement of the summary in ALL CAPS?

Re:Uh?

[findoutmoretoday]

Here today the internet was telling that girl she couldn't be a princess.

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn her into an unhappy misfit.

(ex. Give her a home-built Linux computer while all her friends play fun games on their Dells.)

critical development age!?

[Dahamma]

at a critical developmental age, his 4-year-old daughter wants to be a princess, not a scientist or engineer

This alone makes the entire premise completely idiotic.

Most 4-year-old *boys* want to be professional athletes, firemen, or, astronauts. I am a "principal architect", and I only decided I wanted to be "an engineer" at about age 23 (about a year after I actually worked in the field).

The only "critical development" for a 4 year old should be learning how play well with others and talk in semi-coherent sentences.

Seems like some unrealistic expectations!

[OrangeTide]

Why can't a 4 year old, girl or boy, play with a fantasy? Most little boys I've met aren't playing at realistic roles like scientist or engineer either. They want to be a pokemon master or a super hero or an "army guy". It isn't any different for a girl, a princess is a common fantasy for little girls. And the girls I've met sometimes had super powers or were princesses AND doctors at the same time. A four year old should be encourage to explore whatever fantasy they want and use their imagination freely without judgement.

Because when they get older, some asshole is going to start judging them and a little something is going to die inside of them. Then they'll be free to become the scientist, engineer, kindergarten teacher or stripper they were meant to be.

Re:Seems like some unrealistic expectations!

[Scareduck]

Yes, this.

I will say that it's probably true that "women are taught to" tropes are truer than "men are taught to" ones.

Can't be done.

[qwijibo]

You're not going to change her interests. The best you can do is give her more diverse options, but she's going to have to choose her own path.

How do you know she's got the right personality/character type to be a scientist or engineer? She might grow up to be a legendary military sniper. That's a field that requires a lot of technical ability, understanding, and calculation, but isn't considered a scientific or engineering career.

Observe her preferences and talk to her. If you're trying to project what you want on her, that's not going to stick. If you can find a common interest and share it, that will be easy to develop.

Toys that actually make her think

[JohnA]

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.

Wow

[Anrego]

This guy sounds like an insufferable asshole.

Kids are interesting because they arn't restrained by years of learned social behaviour. Sure they are influenced a bit by society, but at that age they tend to just do what their hearts tell them to do regardless, which to the great frustration of people like the author often conforms to the stereotypes they are trying to fight.

Attempts to raise children in gender neutral environments always seem to end terribly, and of course there's the whole David Reimer thing.

Dad needs to read the first two sentences

[raymorris]

> 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

"Dad is dismayed his 4-year-old daughter wants". It is DAD who has a problem with what his daughter wants, who is upset that a 4-year-old girl is acting like a 4-year-old girl. "The larger society" isn't dismayed by her making her own choices. You are, David. You are the one who is butthurt that she didn't want to trick or treat dressed as an engineer. "The larger society" would be fine with her being a rodeo rider, a pilot, or baker. You sir are the one trying to force your choice of career on her before she even enters kindergarten.

There is one piece of good news, David. Unless you are King David, she won't actually grow up to be a princess. Next week she might want to be an astronaut and a week after that she might want to be a teacher. When she grows up, she might be an artist, a counselor, or an HR professional. She almost certainly won't be a princess, though, so don't worry about that.

Let her be a princess

[Anonymous Coward]

Turns out, it's hard work learning various languages and proper elocution, history, religion, proper manners, protocol and etiquette, art, diplomacy and international relations, and everything else that goes into a well-rounded education to not be a bore and be able to properly fit in with whatever future king your parents arrange for you to marry, or if you are in one of the more progressive kingdoms, the throne itself. I would say you should encourage her to be a proper princess.

Ban Disney movies

[gijoel]

and buy ear muffs for the inevitable screaming.

Re:Ban Disney movies

[wonkavader]

This doesn't work.

The grandparents will show them to her when you've trusted them to babysit. And your relatives will send Christmas gifts all wrapped up and when your little girl open's 'em -- yep: Disney products. And she'll see them at her friends' houses... she'll come home singing some crap song from Frozen over and over.

Her baby-sitter will buy her a Barbie. Women in lots of ads she sees will have their necks lengthend with photoshop. Her school will sell her princess books just like the ones they stock their library with. Costco will aim 90% of the female children's halloween costumes at the princess segment, half of those will be marked Disney. Your daughter will drag you back to the costumes over and over looking for Disney princesses she's seen and beggining you to buy one while you want to just get some cheese and get out.

Because it's not just your daughter who's the target of this long-necked, big-eyed, princess bullshit -- everyone is. And that's why you do get concerned about it, because it's not just Disney telling her to be a pricess, it's EVERYONE.

It's really frustrating having some stranger on the street tell your daughter she's a princess, but it happens all the time. I suspect it's not socially acceptable to snarl back "you calling her a parasite?"

At 4 or 5, she has all the time in the world to decide what she wants to do and be and plenty of time to change her mind about things, but this crap isn't going to stop when she's 10 or 15 or 30 or 60, and her whole life she will be judged and praised or criticized by a nation of people who are hit with the same propaganda.

at least if your mind is as unhealthily obsessive

[Nutria]

Maybe it would be best if he gave her to a less obsessive relative...

The whole article is a clear indication that Auerbach and his wife are as fucked up as those Canadians trying to raise their child genderless.

4 year old ninja

[irrational_design]

My 4 year old wants to be a ninja. Thank goodness social conditioning hasn't deterred him from that admirable career choice.

WTF?

[yndrd1984]

What's worse than being a child in a culture that pushes people into stereotypical roles? Having parents that want to dictate their child's interests in order to make themselves look good.

So one day you daughter says she's “ready for princesses” and "part of me died"? Get the fuck over yourself.

Seriously, stop using your own child as a tool for making yourself look like a good progressive and listen to her for a change. When (and if) she wants to be a nerd, she'll let you know - your job is to make sure she knows she has the choice, not make it for her.

Re:WTF?

[Jiro]

Also, related is a simple fact: most kids, of whichever sex, aren't going to want to be scientists You probably can't get your daughter to want to be one even ignoring that different sexes are interested in different things, because "scientist" is not something that most kids want to become. And even for the few kids who want to be scientists, it's a pretty good bet that at age 4 they know as much about what a scientist does as they do about what a princess does.

This is a variation on "how can I get kids interested in (various nerdy interests of mine)", except it's dressed up in social justice phrasing. Fifty years ago he'd have been trying to get his kid interested in Westerns or Beatles albums.

Adventure Time

[BlackHawk-666]

Let her watch Adventure Time. Princess Bubblegum is both a princess with a castle and servants *and* a really super-smart scientist. There's your role model right there.

Re:Please don't try to make your girl a boy

[x0ra]

Actually, I judge girls by their minds first. Though, I agree, I am on the minority side.

Re:What about men going to college?

[x0ra]

Because it fails to demonstrate the point sjw want to prove. Honesty is the last thing you should ask them to push. They're just biased by their personal agenda.

So build that princess a castle.

[dbc]

Princesses love castles.

Go to the local building supply center, and get enough lumber to build a playhouse in the back yard. Make sure the kid is out there actually swinging a hammer and measuring and cutting wood. I did this with my 4 year old daughter. We had a grand time. Of course, at 4 she couldn't really swing a framing hammer to full effect and needed a lot of help to sink the nails home, but hey, it was a great time. And participating in the entire project from beginning to end was a great way to learn a few practical things. But the most important of all was to treat the idea of a girl doing a construction project as a normal thing.

Also, bury the kid in enough Lego to build a couple of princess castles. At age 4, developing spacial reasoning through tactile learning is going to cause the brain development that becomes math/science/engineering thinking later on.

Another thing I did was as soon as my daughter could reliably count to twenty, I took her to the local electronic surplus houses and had her help me get parts. I'd hand her a box of switches or capacitors and tell her to count out 10 of them for me while I searched out the next part. And of course if she wanted a couple of pretty, shiny, purple caps for her own collection, that's OK too.

For starting on actual coding, Scratch and Lego robots go a long way. When the time comes for that.

So looking back, I'm not sure what I did that worked, or maybe nothing actually worked and my kid would have been an engineer regardless, but she is now in the middle of doing college applications to top engineering schools. And still likes pink and purple. If soldering irons and Bridgeport mills were available in pink, she'd be there. It is not necessary to do a princess-ectomy to end up with an engineer.

They'll be what they want to be

[GrahamCox]

My daughter's 8, and she's quite into science, particularly chemistry. Also reading, particularly Neil Gaiman and inevitably J.K Rowling. She hates the colour pink, and her favourite show on TV is Mythbusters. We didn't do anything to make her "turn out" this way, other than possibly the fact that we discouraged toys that required batteries when she was young, and not forcing stereotyped toys on her, though had she ever shown an interest in Barbie, etc we would not have insisted that she shouldn't have them.

My worry (or one of my many worries) as she is on the threshold of puberty is that she'll be a bit too geeky and that will invite bullying and so on. Ad that in turn will turn her away from her natural interests just to fit in with her friends. All you can do is encourage them to be themselves and be proud of not being part of the crowd.

It could be worse

[quantaman]

I knew one promising kid. Was building apache forks by the time he was two, built his own mircokernel when he was three. But then around three and a half some troublemaker in daycare slipped him a copy of Visual Studio and a VB.net book during naptime. By the time he hit four he's writing VB.net webapps for mars bars, six months later it's Windows Phone apps for smarties.

Poor kid never even made it to five, he got wet-willied trying to swipe a chocolate milk carton at lunch.

What a waste.

I know, let's ask an actual female programmer...

[Shadow of Eternity]

...what she has to say about this entire farce...

tfa in 4 words.

[Anonymous Coward]

dad wanted a boy.

Cage fighting

[Kohath]

Nothing makes a 4 year old more interested in science than watching, and after she turns 5, participating in organized cage fighting. You need to start training her before it's too late.

I would also suggest you wear a luchadore mask around the house and always speak to her using a bad Mexican accent.

I guarantee she will forget about that princess nonsense right away.

Let her be a princess who like science.

[unimacs]

I'm telling you this as a Father of an 11 year old daughter and a 15 year old son. First off social conditioning is real and there are pitfalls. It's disturbing that a lot of people don't seem to recognize that. At the same time I wouldn't be overly concerned that your daughter wants to be a princess. If pretending to be a princess is fun for her, let her enjoy that. At the same time you should be introducing her to things that she wouldn't find through targeted advertising or in the girl's section of a toy store.

There are lots of science activities she can enjoy while dressed up as Ariel. As she gets older, involve her in your hobbies. Kids love to be included in adult activities. At the same time, don't get her toys she's not old enough for. That will just make her frustrated. Also don't try to talk her out of doing the girly things her friends like, but be vigilant about exposing her to other stuff.

Here's an example of where I very nearly missed the boat. I got a Lego Mindstorm set for my son and I to play with. The only mistake I made is not getting it sooner. He now thinks of himself as too old for Legos so he won't do anything with it on his own though he gladly helps me with building and programming the robots. My daughter never showed any interest in it. She is not in any way a shrinking wall flower. If she wants to do something she will typically ask.

But recognizing that the window for this might be small, I just decided to ask her if she wanted to help me one day. She was soooo happy to help. She's pretty good at it too. The sad thing is that if I were to have never asked, she'd never gotten into it.

Re:Well then, let her be a princess

[Jiro]

That is stupid. By this reasoning, if the girl really did want to be a scientist, the dad should make sure she understands the drudgery of working in a lab to 4 AM, how difficult it is depending on a grant application that could leave you out of a job, and how most scientific discoveries are of small things that would be as boring to a kid as political boundaries and court etiquette.

Indoctrinating children...

[Karmashock]

... 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.

Re:ummm, is that what you'd want?

[sound vision]

Although I'm sure there are a lot of busy scientists in various fields, "always-on, after-hours, on-call, and never-ending" sounds more like IT than than 'science' (by which I presume you mean researcher in physics, biology, etc. or maybe engineer)

Re:Bricklayer Father Asks: What Gets Little Girls

[fractoid]

Hairdresser Aubrey Spetsnatz is dismayed that, at a critical developmental age, her 4-year-old son wants to be an astronaut, not a stylist or makeup artist...

You'll get a princess if you raise a princess

[Taco Cowboy]

I am a father of 3 girls. None of my girls call themselves "Princess", and none of them see themselves as someone who needs a "Prince" on a White Horse to rescue her from whatever trouble

I never treat any of my girls as princess. I treat them as normal human beings - normal human beings who understand the danger of this world and who are alert to the dangers around them

The "Programmer Father" is in dismay because his 4-year old girl sees herself as a "Princess", and he got nobody but himself (plus his better half) to blame - because since that little girls was an infant they kept calling her "Princess" and kept treating her as if she is not capable of doing anything for and by herself

Re:You'll get a princess if you raise a princess

[Architect_sasyr]

Ahh shit man. My daughter calls herself a princess. She can also put up shelves, throw a ball, and is top of her grade in the martial arts she elected to do (although this is probably because she saw me head off to do them, so my bad there yes?). We have always spoken to her like she is a human being, and part of our family - and you know what? She's pretty damned independent and capable. You can call her princess without applying the don't do anything to them. Also, fuck it. If she wants to find a prince and marry the man, why the fuck would I stop her.

I don't know why we can't just let kids be kids. If a boy wants to call himself princess, nothing wrong with that, but as soon as a girl calls herself princess we're all up in arms.

Re:You'll get a princess if you raise a princess

[Megane]

When Queen Elizabeth II was just a "princess", she was doing automotive maintenance.

Re: You'll get a princess if you raise a princess

[AcerbusNoir]

+5 Architect_sasyr. Well said (and done). I echo your sentiments from my own similiar experiences as a parent of 4 girls.

Re:You'll get a princess if you raise a princess

[mu51c10rd]

Same here...I'm also the father of all girls. They dress up as princesses, just as easily as they do science experiments, assemble a PC, or do math. Being a princess and "girly" is not mutually exclusive to being smart and independent.

Re:You'll get a princess if you raise a princess

[Whorhay]

Agreed! My Daughter loves princess stuff but still has interest in all kinds of other "boy" stuff. My Son is obviously more physical than she is and he wants to either hit everything or use whatever it is to hit other things, but he also loves to play with baby dolls and his favorite cartoon is Strawberry Shortcake. I don't try and push my interests on my children but when they ask questions about why or how something works I make sure to give them answers that leave them with even more questions. I don't believe in pat or over simplified answers. Hopefully they will follow their own interests and ignore whatever stereotype society tells them they should be.

Re:You'll get a princess if you raise a princess

[Ol Olsoc]

The "Programmer Father" is in dismay because his 4-year old girl sees herself as a "Princess", and he got nobody but himself (plus his better half) to blame - because since that little girls was an infant they kept calling her "Princess" and kept treating her as if she is not capable of doing anything for and by herself

Life is going to throw you a real curve when you find out that you cannot dictate what your daughters are. You have so much less control over their personalities and their outlook that you would ever dare think. And sometimes they will be so pissed off at your Svengali like outlook they will choose the exact opposite of what you demand they think and act, and believe.

Re:I know, let's ask an actual female programmer..

[Shadow of Eternity]

You've got all those words backwards except "anecdote". This actually has a sense of perspective unlike the usual FUD, it's consistent with all the data we've got (again unlike the usual FUD), and it has a clear central premise around which everything including the anecdotes are based.

Let me quote another woman to explain the problem you're having with accepting HedgeMage's arguments:

However we are dealing with an ideology which defines women exclusively as Victims. Therefore women who fail to fulfill the role of Victim must be broken and returned to their proper place. They must be subject to abuse or de-feminized and told they have been corrupted by patriarchal ideology.

Women are supported and encouraged but they are only supported and encouraged to be broken and helpless. They are kept within a set archetype.

The attacks on women now make sense. It's a paradoxical cycle where people abuse women to justify the claim that women need to be defended. Defenders never question their behavior because it is justified by the existence of the victim which they themselves created.

Re:What about men going to college?

[nctritech]

When people can discuss "toxic femininity" without fear of vigilantes getting them fired, you can come back and tell us about the wonders of equality. Until then, men are the more oppressed sex, as evidenced by the fact that it's socially acceptable to talk shit about them but it's not okay to behave that way towards women.

The social pressure here is on the father

[argStyopa]

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.

one thing to consider

[buddyglass]

How many 4-year olds male or female want to be a scientist or engineer when they grow up? Plenty of boys want to be things like firemen, astronauts, soldiers, pro athletes, etc. who don't eventually enter those fields. I'm a software developer and I never wanted to be a software developer growing up. Then again I was born in the 70s, so it wasn't on a lot of peoples' "radar" career-wise when I was a small child.

This is what works for me

[sls1j]

I'm a father of 8 with 4 girls and 4 boys. One of the best ways is to take them out of the cities and into the wilderness, and help them see what is there. To be most effective you need to know what's there yourself. Study the geology of the area, the plants, the animals, the lichens, mosses, mushrooms. When you see something you don't understand ask questions and find the answers. When your children see you learn with a relish they can't help but be curious. Get good at seeing the small and the large so you can point it out. Be good at asking questions. I've found my girls and my boys naturally interested.

Don't just focus on "science" or you'll kill all interest. History is just as important. Science of itself isn't nearly as interesting as adding the human side to it. The stories of how the great ideas of our times came about and how those ideas have been used can make the knowledge come to life in a way that science by itself cannot.

Start Young

[morgauxo]

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

Alternative viewpoint

[Ol Olsoc]

It's obviously way too soon to determine that the little girl will always want to be a "princess"

In fact there really aren't many job opportunities in the princess career path.

But there might be some interesting issues behind the present day fixation on some of the hyper feminine stereotypes going on these days.

Back in the late 70's, when many women were entering the job force in careers that were traditionally held by men, I noticed that many women had the concept that you came in, worked a few years, then moved up into a job where you coasted. It was the idea of a career as a sprint, not a marathon.

That was a nasty surprise, I think, that the jobs they worked so hard to get, and that the equality they gained with men had a downside. But women probably entered the workforce with some unrealistic expectations. I had a lot of female friends and colleagues who burned out.

The world of men wasn't quite the wonderful place some might have imagined. Look at it this way. A lot of men I know think that once you reach a certain level of management, you don't actually work any more, you just sit back and coast until your golden parachute opens. Probably the same for women who were until that time more constrained in job choice. The "Grass is greener on the other side" outlook.

Now imagine many women, who had wanted the opportunities that men had, because men's lives must be better, right? So they rightfully got those opportunities, but found out that perhaps the 9-5 slog with 2 hours commute each way, wasn't necessarily the Nirvana they thought it was.

So fast forward to today, where there are a lot of stay at home fathers, and the woman is the breadwinner. Women are just as much told they need to be in the workforce in some career, so I suspect many who lould like to stay at home feel pressure against it. There are several stay at home dads on the street I live on, and to a man, they love being a stay at home father. There are worse fates.

This is all to say that the daily grind isn't all it's made up to be, and that wanting to be a princess, is not all that surprising. It's a great lifestyle if you can get it.

So father, your daughter has opportunities a lot of women did not have in earlier times. If she wants to be a chemical engineer, or a plumber, she can. But a princess is also in that mix. My guess is that eventually she won't want to be a princess, and drift toward a field with better employment opportunities.

But she's got free will, so don't mess with it.

The career prospects for princesses are bleak

[DanielOom]

but the salary tends to be royal.