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Are Girl-Focused Engineering Toys Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes?
theodp writes: VentureBeat's Ruth Read casts a skeptical eye at the current rage of toy segregation meant to inspire tomorrow's leaders in STEM: "Toys geared at girls serve to get them interested in coding and building when they're young, hopefully inspiring their educational interests down the road. But these gendered toys may be hurting women by perpetuating a divide between men and women." Read concludes, "Ultimately, girls (who will become women) are going to have to learn and work in a world where genders are not segregated; as will men. That means they need to learn how to interact with one another as much as they need to be introduced to the same educational opportunities. If STEM education is as much for girls as it is for boys, perhaps we should be equally concerned with getting boys and girls to play together with the same toys and tools, as we are with creating learning opportunities for girls."
Both genders should have the same opportunities. They don't necessarily have the same interests.
Tips and traps on the right way to teach girls STEM, from Theodp and Slashdot.
Extraordinarily insightful, I'm sure.
Remember when this site wasn't constantly about SJW topics and jobs? When it didn't try to make you feel bad for being a nerd?
Screw you Dice.
Is Slashdot rhetorically asking about an issue that people has been pointing out for years about this matter? For the love of Pete: YES – toys "geared at girls" is stereotyping at its finest! Loads of toys (not even mentioning professional tools) is not focused on gender whatsoever. Stop painting them in pink, both symbolically and literally speaking! It helps no one, especially not girls in the end.
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
One just needs to fire up a random twitch stream hosted by a female. There is a VERY high chance that you'll look right down her cleavage because SHE positioned the webcam that way. .....
Most webcams by men stop at the shoulders or right below
I know it is the fault of men because some watch it and by doing so are forcing her to expose her boobs.
Poor exploited women!
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Girls - to do the dishes
Girls - to clean up my room
Girls - to do the laundry
Girls - and in the bathroom
Girls, that's all I really want is girls
Ultimately, girls (who will become women) are going to have to learn and work in a world where genders are not segregated; as will men
No.. if feminists have anything to do with it, girls\women will perpetually be recruited and promoted to fulfill diversity quotas and satisfy PR, and the majority of the work will have to be done by men. Capable women would leave the field over 1-2 generations, since, due to feminism, companies are forced to recruit incapable women alongwith capable ones, leading to the entire gender being stereotyped and written off as present and promoted only due to quotas\diveristy\PR
:P thanks for that clarification i just couldn't make the connection before.
/sarcasm
Stop it with these male vs female stories already.
Rather than trying to get girls to play with these gendered toys, a better approach would be to see how traditionally female tasks overlap with STEM. For example, when a female is making a sandwich, point out to her that she is in fact building a structure from component parts, a task not unrelated to engineering. This will give her a warm glow, and possibly lead to future interest in civil engineering. Or worst case, better sandwiches.
Question mark headline.
Men always rule the great professions so women will always be the exception in great professions. Brain power comes to those with the mass for the big brain. Women don't need brain power. Evolution has dealt the cards for women; they have what they have because they have what they need, and no more. With exceptions.
So why bother trying? You don't make engineering toys for girls, they complain about them not existing; you make them for girls, they complain about them being stereotypical.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Someone doesn't know very much about child development. Specifically, those cooties that girls see crawling all over boys weren't invented by the patriarchy to keep women down.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This assumes that most of these girl specific initiatives intend to actually help girls. They aren't, and instead serve as flashpoints to draw money to charlatans, much like any of the "think of the children" campaigns from the last few decades.
I swear the similarities between modern feminism and the Satanism scare of the 80s are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
And the conclusion is correct- most of the women coders I know were, in part, goaded into familiarity by playing with their brothers.
"Are non-problems causing non-issues?"
I can definitely see where this could become a problem. A lot of the "girl" toys are playing directly into the gender stereotypes to get girls interested. If you want girls to like it, make it pink and put flowers on it. Instead of working to actually make it something that would actually interest girls (or god forbid both boys and girls) they just slap some paint on it and give it a girly name.
The bigger issue though is that they have to make "girl" things because most of them are specifically geared towards boys. That is why the answer they come up with is to make it girly. There is no reason we need special Legos in a pink box with cats and houses specifically for girls. Just stop specifically targeting boys with your marketing and girls will want to play with it (see the ads from the 70s that have both genders in the ads). More stereotypes are not the answer to the current stereotypes.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Why make science and engineering toys girly? Because of the parents who wouldn't buy a non-gendered toy. Girls enjoy fishing newts out of a pond, making towers and knocking them down. etc. as much as boys, but many parents discourage this. Enjoying these things at 3 to 4 years is a good foundation for enjoying construction and understanding stability, or examining echo systems when they are older.
STEM fields are unfair towards women, we want special treatment!
Oh, we're getting special treatment now? That's unfair towards women!
pink?
"Equality for everyone!"
"Wait, what's that? There is a war on and the draft has been reinstated?"
"You need to man up, get up, and go fight to protect me!"
That is really wrong because we should be tracing 'girl' skills. Learning and hacking cooking, for instance, teaching important skills. Learning to sew is much better at teaching hand eye coordination than video games. It is easier to teach if you pander to the boys, but doing so does not make one a good stem teacher.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You could equally ask why men aren't flocking to careers in nursing, early childhood care, or beauty therapy. I suspect it has less to do with discrimination, and more to do with men just don't give a shit about those careers. Be it money, status, working conditions, whatever. Men don't want it. Same probably goes for women in technology, construction, and trades. I don't even care if there is a gender imbalance in nursing, early childhood care, or beauty therapy. I don't know any women who care either. But if I did care, I might find that balancing the male side of the equation in female dominated careers already half solves the female side if things in male dominated careers. Men are welcome to join female dominated careers, if they want. Women are welcome to join male dominated careers, if they want. If people don't want, then they don't want.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
My 7 year old boy likes blue, cars, soccer and soldiers.
My 4 year old girl likes pink, flowers and babies.
They don't care about sterotypes. They like what they like. If a pink flowery toy gets my girl interested in engineering then that's fine. If my son wants a action packed army themed engineering kit, then thats fine too.
Except that there may well be a large influence in the culture handed over by upbringing. That is, we think both genders get the same opportunities only they don't, not really. This was much stronger previously but may still be there more than we think.
Then again, I'm not sure that clumsily done toys to get women into engineering isn't overcompensating the whole thing, and maybe the effect they're trying to counteract and compensate for isn't as strong as the proponents of these toys may have assumed.
To wit, you still see people derping about the "gender gap" in pay, which upon closer examination turns out to be all but nonexistent. There is a maternity gap in pay, but that, while related, isn't quite the same thing. Women appear to be getting paid the same for the same amount of work, but many prefer to work less, moreso if with children. Should employers pay more for the same amount of work done just because the employee is with child? If so, why?
Back to this here thing: I don't know what the problem really is and so I don't know if these toys are going to help or hinder. Of course you can just throw your solution into the market and see how it does. But then the answer is "time will tell".
The article is bad, useful idiots over-react as expected, Streisand effect achievement unlocked!
Ah, jewelry. Arose as predominantly associated with women over men because in older cultures it was a method of storing wedding dowries physically on their dowries. Not saying jewelry in the modern context is as gendered, but still- deeply funny in the historical context. And when you look at women in STEM and their lack of such adornments.
Mother was a STEM professor and was so progressive/lazy/frugal that she didn't bother enforcing any gender stereotypes and just told me to share the legos and k'nex with my brother. Surprisingly, they didn't take a y-chromosome to operate.
BIONICLES.
Taking something that's supposedly in a male space and then dressing it in pink ribbons for girls is definitely a lot more offensive than just offering to share Indiana Jones and Avalon Hill games with your sister. This bs makes me glad to be STEM where this is not a raging debate but an unspoken understanding that is miles less important than whatever work there is too do in the lab.
Not another slashdot post about gender and STEM! You realize that before you get all this stupidity figured out and are finally satisfied with how things are going, our culture will have devolved to the point where this won't even matter anymore. (Or Islam will have taken over the Western world, in which case this whole topic will not matter for the next 1,000 yrs...)
Work on toy preferences in non-human primates shows a distinct male preference for some toys vs females for other. non socialized non humans, also pre-socialized humans (infants).
OK, now I actually read the article... basically, the article is right in a way it identifies the root problem: The segregation of all toys into boys and girls. Including the idea behind it: Creating less reusable toys. But then, the article failed to notice that this has nothing to do with STEM toys or not. In fact, it is one of three possible solutions:
1. Force toy industry to retreat and have a gender-neutral toy section again, which then could include stem/educational toys
2. Bring stem/educational toys into the dedicated "girls" section by conforming to stereotyped "girls" toys
3. Agains all advertising and peer pressure, somehow get or force your kids to play with toys for the other gender. (Good luck with that one. may be possible, if your kid is able to withstand that peer pressure, he or she would have traced their carreer plans disregarding any social pressure anyway.)
bickerdyke
That's what I've been saying since the beginning of this whole mess. I firmly believe that any women should have the right to enter the STEM field if she so chooses, just as I believe that any man should have the right to become a fashion model or a ballerina if he so chooses. If we treat both boys and girls with respect and allow them to become whatever they chose, that will do far more for "inequality" than giving preferential treatment to one or special toys for one will ever accomplish.
However, this is a bit off topic, but even so: Glassworking has been a hobby of mine for quite a long time, as even though it's somewhat artsy (and I do enjoy being artsy every now and then), it also requires a very high degree of multitasking, practice, quick thinking, and the strive for perfection (and it also has a practical use too, unlike most art things). Although this is just personal observation, there are many more women in the field then men - In fact, out of a group of maybe 10 or 12 people, I have sometimes been the only male in the entire thing. However, even when that happens, the nobody here gives a crap: we're here to make things and to learn, not to stare at each other in a lustful manner. Similarly, when there's only one woman in the class (a much rarer occurrence, granted), it's the same as usual. Nobody cares, so even though there are more woman than men statistically, everybody's treated equally - the difference essentially doesn't exist, because no one's treated differently. I don't know if it's a special quirk of the studio where I go to make glass, but I suspect it's pretty similar throughout most of them. Maybe it's the fact the skill is hands-on, as opposed to a field of conceptual thinking, but it might be worth looking at why that is.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Absolutely girls and boys are different. They definitely play differently and prefer different toys.
But that doesn't mean that every girl is into pink frilly stuff, building blocks that make a kitchen, dolls, makeup, etc. And not every boy is into muscle cars, soldiers, violent games or spaceships.
Unfortunately, manufacturers rigidly enforce the stereotypes. I was out with my daughter one time at a department store and we were in the kids' clothes section. They might as well have put up a fence where the "girls'" t-shirts ended and the "boys'" t-shirts began: Girls' were pink or flowery or featuring hearts, ballerinas, kittens, puppies, etc. Boys' featured snarling superheroes, bad-ass trucks, etc. and were generally dark-colored. My daughter rolled her eyes at all of this; although she's a perfectly feminine girl, she still feels most comfortable in comfy dark sweatpants and a plain t-shirt.
There are many boys and girls being forced into unnatural stereotypes by society and by manufacturers. Here's a radical idea: Just make kids' toys and let the kids themselves figure out if they like them.
Holy shit, we just can't win here. Either we're being dicks to women by not letting them in and any attempts to help are seen as an insult. So you know what, fuck you. Fuck you all you stupid SJW asshats. DIAF.
Posting this on /. is a bit like asking a KKK rally what they think about affirmative action.
There are many forces at work to discourage young females from participating in STEM fields. Most of them are subtle and societal, from peer pressure to gender-based toy marketing. (OK, that one's not so subtle. But it is incessant.) Any attempt to level this playing field and encourage young, disenfranchised people to get interested is a good start. Nobody is claiming it's the final solution. The hope is that it will push back against some of these societal pressures that tend to steer young women away from tech fields.
If you're tempted to say "girls just aren't interested, so why force it?" then I ask you: where would you draw the line? Most kids "just aren't interested" in learning to read or write, or doing math. Should we stop trying to make learning interesting to them? Should we allow them, at age 5, to opt out of the basic skills people in our society need to succeed? "No math for me, Teach! I'm on the all-recess track."
Catering to your audience's interests just makes sense when you're trying to teach something. Unfortunately most STEM teaching up to now has been targeted to a typically male mindset. What I hear from the commenters in this article is: "How dare they start catering to someone that's not like me! How dare they extend the privilege I have unconsciously enjoyed to someone else!"
Get over yourselves, boys. And man-up, while you're at it.
"may be hurting women by perpetuating a divide between men and women"
That depends if THIS TYPE of divide is actually harmful or not. I think this divide exists whether or not these toys exist.
Currently, girls play with "girl" toys (Barbie) that don't lead to a career in STEM. Boys play with "boy" toys (Hot Wheels) that do lead to a career in STEM.
If a girl plays with a "boy" toy, then it can lead to a career in STEM, but apparently they aren't interested in doing that.
These toys are attempting to introduce "girl" toys that lead to a career in STEM.
Let's solve the bigger "problem" of women not being interested in STEM, before we worry about the nonsense issue of sexist toys, because the status quo is already sexist.
I find it funny that people expect marketing to in some way be ethical, like it has a choice. Marketing is driven by popular opinion. If a marketing group decides to be ethical and make gender neutral product, and the society is pro gender segregation, they will loose millions and go out of business. We all know this. Disney isn't causing people to go out and buy millions of dollars worth of princess gear and toys, but they know if they stop making it due to 'ethical reasons', they will loose out.
These changes will happen over time. Not just pulling the plug. We had boy tools and girl dolls. Now we have blue tools and pink tools. It is a process of time. we as individuals need to make ethical decisions in raising and teaching our children so that they can drive marketing down a more ethical path. We decide what marketing advertises to us.
"Research" means nothing to the folks, who confuse the Universe that is with the Universe that should be. And, unlike the former, the latter is malleable and subject to change without notice.
Remember the denunciations — both passionately angry and "scientific" — of people, who suggested, "homosexuality is a choice", for example? We were repeatedly told both in print and in schools, that "gays are born that way" and thus it is both stupid and cruel to blame them for their lifestyle.
And maybe it is — I do not know. But the The Current Truth is changing. And, unlike Ben Carson, nobody yells at Miley Cirus for "adopting a more fluid label to her sexuality". Sexuality, you see, is a "social construct" now (and since 2004!) — and whatever a human actually feels is simply a reflection of "stereotyping" to be broken, and "peer pressure" to be resisted. With pride.
Whichever is true, both can not be true at the same time, but the conflict of these two ideas does not bother their proponents whatsoever, such logical rational beings they are. "Research" my tail...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Everyone knows that there's no scientific difference between male and female- especially neurologically- so the genders would never have different interests if not for nurture. While we're getting rid of female-specific toys, lets get rid of women's clothing stores and such, too, because those are just driving a big wedge between the genders and furthering the stereotypes and male agendas.
Gamergate punks fuck off.
I don't think people understand how complicated the matter of gender stereotypes are as far as roles in our society. This begins as early as birth. Parents immediately give their child a pink or a blue cap depending on whether or not it's a boy or a girl. While the child is too young to understand this, they will look back on that picture and understand later in life. The point that is more important is that because how we treat each gender in society and until we learn to break ourselves of this, we will continue to shape our society as such.
Now, my problem is I don't mind these roles so much and in fact, as a guy, a girl in a dress for a particular event is always welcome and sometimes preferred. But I try and not be judgmental as far as what a female can accomplish. Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and Hedy Lemarr reshaped the world for Information Systems. Because of this, I know not only can the opposite sex program, but they can leave a lasting impact just as much if not more than their male counterparts.
Place something witty here
I think we've got girls caught up pretty well; it's time to teach boys how to work with girls as equals. We can start by teaching them that being called a girl isn't a vile insult. Help them break free of their gender stereotypes just as feminism has helped women break free of theirs.
I've always understood that getting anyone, boys or girls, into STEM fields has been a long-standing problem. I imagine even if you had just as many female engineers as male, there would still be a shortage with subsequent demand for more. So while it's all well and good if you want to target girls specifically (and maybe they do need to be targeted differently), doing that in lieu of trying to solve the larger problem just seems like willful ignorance at best.
Girls and boys are different. Men and women are different. Despite all the gay-wad bullshit with cross-gendered people, the vast majority of men are men, and women are women.
You want female engineers? Give them a fucking REASON to want to be engineers! If that means gender focused toys, tools, or whatever, GIVE IT TO THEM!
There simply are not any women who find all of my activities appealing. That's because they aren't men. The most masculine women in the world thinks that guys are a pain in the ass, and stupid, for all the crap we do.
STOP TRYING TO CHANGE THEM! RESPECT THEM AS THEY ARE!
The ladies have some legitimate complaints about us guys, but you can't turn men into women, either. Sometimes, we're going to get under each other's skins. It happens. Hell, even MEN get under my skin sometimes, and I ARE ONE!
So - ladies, come on in, join the crowd. And, if the odd guy gets to damned obnoxious, just kick him in the nuts. It's doubtful you'll have to repeat it. Word gets around. "That woman ain't going to put up with no shit! Cool it!"
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
There is a Toronto startup making a programming oriented girl's toy called Linkitz. I think it's a really cool toy.
They are geared towards socializing, because it turns out girls like that sort of thing.
I think this is a good example of an effective way to stimulate STEM interest in young girls. The toys aren't necessarily pink and "girly", and they aren't reinforcing gender stereotypes. Instead they have done research on what kind of toys young girls like to play with, and built on that. They've ended up with a toy that is designed with girls in mind, but it wouldn't seem unusual to see a boy using one.
In the Victorian era, pink was considered a color for boys—it was a lighter version of red, which was considered a very masculine color.
There's absolutely nothing biological about the current trend of girls liking pink. It's entirely a product of our culture, which says "girls should like pink."
Similarly, any research that shows differences in job or academic field preferences by gender had damn well better show some kind of controlling for cultural factors, or it's got absolutely no value in showing what girls "naturally" like.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Translate female for male: Are Male-Focused Engineering Toys Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes?
... reinforces gender sterotypes.
The means are the ends. If you want people to not take gender seriously and just treat each other as equals then you need to not take gender seriously and treat each other as equals.
If you take gender seriously and treat the genders unequally then you'll create a system were people take gender really seriously and treat the genders differently.
Be the change by being the end. By matching your means to your end, you create your goal.
The current idea is increasing gender tensions and racial tensions. IT is not creating equality because it is trying to create racial and sexual quotas.
You're not going to get an equal society by creating quotas or pseudo quotas.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Toy manufacturers, like any other business, take their best guess as to what they can sell. If they're right, they make money. If they're wrong, they don't. This doesn't need to be debated or agonized over.
If you don't like something, don't buy it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you read the highly moderated posts by the sexist morons that seem to make up the majority of Slashdot posters and moderators - the problem isn't that they're not asking or interested in asking that question. It's that even when confronted with the evidence, they're denying that its a valid question in the first place - the sociological equivalent of dividing by zero.
Yet the same crowd shouts for blood whenever a climate change denier or young earth creationist pops up.
If you have a passion for a field, the fact that you might be a demographic minority, whatever that demographic might be, is generally not by itself going to make you uncomfortable enough that you don't want to do it any more. If, however, you are treated as anything less than an equal in that field because of your demographic, then that's going to be a serious problem... but that's is a problem with the people... and not a problem that is necessarily inherent to the field.
So instead of encouraging women to enter STEM fields, per se... just encourage them to enter whatever field that interests them... and if being treated unequally is a problem, we should really just be educating people to treat others with respect, regardless of their gender.... then, when women happen to enter what may happen to be a primarily male-dominated field, they don't get treated any differently, so they have no reason to be uncomfortable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Perhaps if the major influence on how an adult behaves is whatever toys they played with, we should simply stop with the engineering toys and focus on toys that are overflowing with ethics and morals. I mean, honestly, if that's how fickle people are, we'd be able to close all the jails, right?
Or perhaps people are idiots for thinking that the shape of the plastic crap they played with when they were 5 actually made a massive difference in their life.
I think a lot of this gender inequality in certain fields is less due to the fields and more to do with how children are raised to begin with. Granted, I don't have any scientific evidence to back it up, but from what I see perpetuated by parents and in the entertainment industry (particularly in the past), I feel this has some merit.
My wife and I never forced our daughter to do the things girls are "supposed to do". She'll be going into the 7th grade next year and will be taking advanced courses in every subject. She excels in math and science and will be taking her math classes with the 9th grade and getting several high school credits for other courses as well.
She has, and has had, many friends who are boys as well as girls. The way parents treat their children based on gender, from an early age, is astounding to me. Most dress their daughters in cute pink dresses and show them Disney princess movies and get them play kitchens. To me it seems that they are being taught from an early age that they need to spend time in the kitchen and rely on a man to take care of them.
I got those things for my daughter as well when she asked for them. But I also got her toy dinosaurs when she wanted them as well as Nerf guns, and scifi movies, etc. Stuff that most parents got for their sons only. I also got her tons of books and read to her from and early age. She had a computer before she was 2 years old too.
When my daughters friends, who are boys, are afraid of something that my daughter is not afraid of; their parents will try to shame them because they won't do something that a girl will do. It's not just the fathers that do this either. We were at a picnic along a river a few years ago and some of the kids were fishing. My daughter had no issues putting a worm on a hook. Some of the boys were afraid to even touch a worm. The mothers were telling them they needed to "man up" because my daughter could do it.
There very well may be issues within some of these industries, but I think we may need to look at society and how we teach our children from an early age too.
It's simply not possible that millions of years of evolution has created genetic bias. Thus, not acceptable. Maybe men nor women have full control over what their preferences are, well before birth, and well into life.
One of the problems here should be obvious. We've driven men out of elementary and middle school education. We decided as a society that all men who want to work with children are pedophiles, and made it so the few men left in elementary school talk about parents watching them with suspicious eagle eyes, and act differently towards them than they do to female teachers.
So what you have left are mostly female teachers who grew up in an era when girls weren't supposed to be in to STEM. Maybe if girls had some more male role models instead of women who grew up playing with barbie (and probably have an English degree or an education degree, but unlikely to have a STEM degree), then they might feel about STEM the same way many boys do... That's it fun and interesting.
Those of us who still live in reality understand full-well that boys and girls are different. They are genetically different. They are structurally different. They are hormonally different. They think and act differently. There are statistical norms for boys and there are statistical norms for girls....... and those two sets of norms are not the same.
In modern post-rational left-leaning societies it has become fashionable to pretend that reality does not exist, but that does not make it so.
The really dumb thing is that man and women being different is one of the best things about life; these differences can be irritating, endearing, frustrating, exciting, mystifying, confusing, and more .... but would many of us truly want to live in a world without these differences? This completely insane drive to pretend reality is different in order to satisfy some political agenda should be opposed by anybody with a functional brain.
Gender neutral toys are possible and available. Our Brackitz building toys (http://brackitz.com) are loved and used equally by both girls and boys. At times they build different things to solve different problems. Thus, the toy is an open-ended toy that presents itself like a tool (think hammer, sewing machine, wrench, materials, design software). What problem the child solves is up to them--girl or boy. This is the key--let the kids express their interests and not be told their interests.
If a girl builds a piece of furniture for her dolls and a boy builds a car garage who cares when it is their internal drive, design and motivation. However, if you give a boy a car garage to play with we as consumers of the toys are prescribing the garage and limiting the problem solving benefits. Or perhaps the reverse happens. We have seen many spaceships come from the minds of girls when using gender neutral materials.
Been done. In the mid-fifties, Lionel got the idea that, wow, I mean, *girls* might like to play with train sets. So they made one for girls
I add the link (I searched on lionel girls train), to prove just how sexist, not to say simply outright *stupid* they were about it. And yes, as you might guess, girls who wanted to play with trains wanted trains that looked like *real* trains, not "girl trains", and yes, Lionel dropped this dumb crap within a year or so.
Boys are not from Mars, girls are not from Venus. They're all humans from Earth - deal with it.
mark "and one of my daughters is a better programmer than you are"
Eh, forget the ./
Dice you've successfully figured out how to run one of the most best 'news' and opensource websites and run them into the ground for profit. /. and Fark were the only 2 places that could handle 9/11 traffic. I rode out that entire day on both sites when CNN was crumbling.
I'm glad I had Slashdot over Reddit when I was an angsty tenager. I took pride in trying to get +5 comments and put effort into doing so. Honestly slashdot made me a better writer. Reddit is nice for short terse communication but sometimes I want to "talk with adults".
Rant continued
" girls (who will become women) " - whew, am glad we cleared that one up. Been wondering where all these women come from.
I have spent 7 years performing at least 7 tests per year, and sometimes as many as 20 tests, and my daughters have been "native pink" since they were pre-verbal. There is zero way this is externally imposed. The door to go other than sparkly, pink, rainbow, flowers, puppies, ponies, kitties, butterflies has been the primary option in at least half the tests. I have had double-blind and not - they are consistent.
I had a heart-to-heart with Lego several years ago about their toys. They can't get the girls to play with the toys without the changes they introduced. Either they make pastel colored or they don't sell to girls.
Perhaps you are confusing same for equal. What if girls, for whatever intrinsic reason, prefer pink more often than boys do? What if it is not socially imposed?
If you enforce identicality instead of equality then your result is going to have worse outcomes. Consider the gender-reversed option: If pink sparklies were required in the curriculum and work-environment for every male engineer, what would you do to the rate of candidation? There would be many guys for whom that is enough dis-incentive that they would not enter the field - they would comprise a statistically significant alteration in membership. Similarly - enforcing pink or non-pink is going to harm participation rates of at least one gender.
If you enforce equality - equal pay for equal work, equal treatment, then you are likely to have the maximum number of participants whether or not they like "pink" or "blue". Pick the higher, smarter, ground. Be willing to question your assumptions. Be willing to use data to do the deciding.
For the short-term. I've been at the bad of tech bubbles and outsourcing, and I cannot recommend STEM above other career options because of that.
State- or county-specific law is a safer career choice than STEM in my opinion because somebody in an outsourcing sweatshop in Timbuktu is less likely to bet their education on a single US state. If it falls thru, they have no local option in Timbuktu etc. What other country is going to need a Rhode Island lawyer in Timbuktu?
Thus, promote law careers for women instead of STEM if you really care about their longer-term future.
Table-ized A.I.
If you don't give kids toys they will be interested in picking up, any educational value is meaningless.
The stereotype of the penny pinching Jew reflects the fact that they're naturally tight with money! The stereotype of the lazy Mexican reflects the fact that they're just naturally lazy! All the research shows this!
Instead buy them LEGOs, any of a dozen sand box builder games, model rockets, remote controlled drones, e-readers (loaded with lot's of post apocalypse/Sci-Fi books)DLS cameras/Go-Pros, tools and art supplies, 3D printers, etc. The other is to smack them when they try to sign up for the social sciences and make them instead take Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Calculus, Physics, Shop/Maker classes, Chemistry, Engineering, tech trades, and other course work that takes a bit more brain power than what is required to regurgitate Fem-Nazi social Marxist talking points.
All the discussion about what toys for boys and toys for girls should be is nice, but the reality of it is that toy makers need to design products and marketing that sells product and makes profits. You can wish for gender neutral toys all day, and there is a certain amount of space for that, but some people want blue toys and some want pink toys - very simple. A manufacturer has to sell what people want to buy - there's not much point in anything else. There is plenty of opportunity for both sides.
I know for my son and daughter, we had toys for each, and toys to share whether they be dolls or construction sets. In the end they each chose the toys and interests they enjoyed - so my daughter is pretty good with the shotgun, but she prefers the arts and people care type work. My son prefers the heavy lifting and works in a warehouse and has joined the Air Force. To each their own.
Hello Kitty HeathKit ShortWave Radio Kit
Hello Kitty Adventures on Chemical Island
Hello Kitty Let's Vivisect Barbie!
Shit, I'd buy those.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
One summer was spent building and then destroying a plastic model air force (whatever that plastic is, it burns VERY well). Another was spent recreating the Challenger disaster by drilling holes in model rocket engines. Girls need to be taught to like to like to blow shit up
I finally realized what all this pressure for female coders is about!
The powers that be want to be able to eliminate all their male competition: (e.g. like schools of fish or Dr. Strangelove). Since the technocracy is rising, they can soon rely on robots for all the heavy lifting -- their only problem remaining is the maintaince and programming of the robots and systems they don't want to be bothered with -- so they still need some annoying technical people around. At the moment they're mostly male. :( Not good if you're trying to be the last man on earth!
Conclusion: if the goal is for the males that are now in power (or their great-grandsons who will be in power) to be the only males on the face of the planet: then for everything to keep going they must somehow inculcate females to code and eliminate the need for all (other) males entirely.
But instead lol @ the nigger with the 6-digit UID talking about "how slashdot has always been". 20721 Represent.
You get modded down because you repeatedly try to hawk stupid made up bullshit as the truth here. Left/right has nothing to do with it.
I finally realized what all this pressure for female coders is about! The powers that be want to be able to eliminate all their male competition: (e.g. like schools of fish or Dr. Strangelove [imdb.com]). Since the technocracy is rising, they can soon rely on robots for all the heavy lifting -- their only problem remaining is the maintaince and programming of the robots and systems they don't want to be bothered with -- so they still need some annoying technical people around. At the moment they're mostly male. :( Not good if you're trying to be the last man on earth!
Conclusion: if the goal is for the males that are now in power (or their great-grandsons who will be in power) to be the only males on the face of the planet: then for everything to keep going they must somehow inculcate females to code and eliminate the need for all (other) males entirely.
I know quite a few people who are in charities specifically dedicated to increasing the pipeline of women into STEM. I can say most of these people are excited whenever a "girl focused engineering toy" comes out as they can use it as a way to get girls engaged in workshops.
I'm not talking about Pink Legos or Pink Dump Trucks, but tools like Jewliebots that are "girly" things that are programmable or otherwise have some kind of STEM related focus. Getting girls to enjoy a fun workshop where they program robots or jewelry and then using this as a way to introduce them to the concept of engineering is a great way to teach them what engineering actually is.
This is the biggest problem these kinds of groups are trying to solve - girls in school often aren't told what engineering is.
I just hope they remove all the dihydrogen monoxide.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Than they did in the early 80's? No, not significantly, not enough to account for the massive drop (especially given the orders-of-magnitude increase in the size of the field).
You're exactly the kind of sexist of moron I referred to. When all else fails, you'll stoop to making shit up to justify your nonsense.
Mod parent up!!
Forcing gender issues into STEM is unproductive and a waste of time. Trying to funnel and shoehorn girls/women into STEM is a waste of time, money, and effort. Leave the doors open and invite them in, if they still choose not to cross the threshold, that's their choice, but no one can say an effort wasn't made and leave it at that. Enough with the coddling and hyperfocus special interests. We are now a nation of whiners and hypersensitives.
Yes.
Because 'girl-focused engineering toys' are 'focused' on girls how? By making them conform to female stereotypes.
Ken
You may discuss, if you really need to get people into something, they would not consider themselfes. If you want them to try it anyway, it's a good idea to make it somehow compatible to their current interests. So if you discard the "girl focused" toys, you will not reach the girly girls (while the tomboys will use the boy tech-toys anyway). So there is some purpose in it. If they will stay longer than needed for seeing "okay, it starts girly, but then it gets seriously STEM, which is not my beer" is another question. The tech women i know have no problem to use standard tech without womenizing it first.