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

[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

[Hognoxious]

More monkey business:

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

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[Shadow of Eternity]

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

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.