5 ms·

Bingo. I'm female, and a comp eng student. The problem might not be the gender bias among researchers so much, but the attitudes little girls face when learning

• DaniFong 16y ago
  Definitely. My bet is that the biggest issue is peer pressure which, honestly, is why I think top down efforts from parents and teachers and governments to boost girl's involvement in STEM are so ineffective. Most of the early development kids do in whatever field, be it sports or science, is driven by a need for approval (so are most other things at school). Unless you have a group of peers that you'd like to emulate and that you want to impress and engage with who are also doing science, you're probably not going to learn science. If the kids that are interested in science are otherwise not interested in anything you like (you like country, they like rock, you like comedies, they like sci-fi), then you're way less likely to end up studying what they do. A possible answer might be to make science clubs for girls, with awesome field-trips and awesome teachers. Physics can lead to, say, kinesiology and dancing, instead of making robots. Biology class can get outside of cell studies and into living animals. Chemistry can lead to molecular gastronomy, the development of organic hairdyes -- these kinds of things. These are the seeds from which the other studies can sprout: unless their planted, girls just won't be engaged. In my research, and my personal experience, girls (in North America at least) shy away from the sciences well before they are in the running to become researchers. There's problems there too, but you hear more about them because the women thus affected have a lot more at stake and a way to make their voice heard -- not because it's a bigger issue. The slip seems to happen in Jr. High/Middle School, right when social pressures start to really mount. You can see this in some of the literature on mathematically precocious youth, especially regarding the disrupted relationship that girls have with mathematics confidence versus skill (with adolescent girls there is almost no, or in fact a negative, correlation, between their mathematical ability and their belief in that ability -- one might suggest this feeds into significantly reduced efforts in acceleration, extra-curricular work, harder courseloads, etc.)
• pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >If you grow up hearing that girls can't do computers, can't do math, can't do science, cos science is a boy thing, while hearing that language is something girls are good at, you get a lot of female language majors. Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences"). Are women also worried that they are under-represented in autism figures, something which appears to closely related to the generalised male ability with mathematics and disability in respect of social aptitude. >If they'd treat people the same from the start [...] You mean ignore that people are different and want different things?
  • MichaelSalib 16y ago
    Who says this? I've never heard it except in debates where it is levelled as the reason why boys prefer mathematically biased subjects ("hard sciences"). My wife's AP Physics teacher told her that (1) "women are incapable of doing a good job in engineering and the hard sciences" and (2) "the only way you'll get a girl as captain of the science/engineering-technology team is over my dead body". The wonderful thing about (2) is that for many years, captaincy of said team was based on who got the highest scores on a technical exam. That year, my wife got the highest score. After she beat everyone else, said teacher explained that the captain would be selected based on a combination of technical proficiency (which my wife aced) and "leadership" (whatever the hell that means). This was not at some podunk school in the middle of nowhere; it was at a very well funded school which performed extremely well in national academic competitions. Now, I'm not saying this guy is representative of people in general. What I am saying is that you can't claim this bullshit never happens. It does. Within the last few years even. And if you've made it this far in life without ever observing it yourself or hearing any first hand accounts, maybe that has more to do with your own biases and the way you treat women than anything else.
    • pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >And if you've made it this far in life without ever observing it yourself or hearing any first hand accounts, maybe that has more to do with your own biases and the way you treat women than anything else. Oh so not having observed a claimed bias that is inherently unobservable - but still claimed as in the sibling comment (how can you tell that the teacher graded people lower rather than them simply attaining a lower level; people don't achieve equally in exams to their on going work) - not having made this observation makes me a misogynist?? "the way you treat women"? Excuse me, do you even know me. Perhaps my scientific wants mean that I require proof where others are willing to accept hearsay and anecdote. Approaching your anecdotal evidence as a crime, as what you claim surely is, one might ask what the motivation of the alleged offender was - why would it matter to a teacher what sex the student is. Are you sure that the teacher didn't just dislike your [now] wife; you're not yourself biased? What did her parents say, or were they complicit? Don't schools in your country care about abuse of power? Did she bother to say "like Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Lise Meitner, ..." granted I can't think of too many examples in the upper-echelons but a clear proof that the teacher was wrong. Is it possible that the teacher was attempting to motivate her, this sort of thing does happen. What school was it, who was the teacher?