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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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