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from the doesn't-stem-student's-interest dept.
Research into the obvious, but someone has finally done it: Three women researchers have studied the behavior of undergraduates in STEM fields, and concluded that there basically is no problem. From the abstract:
"The results show that high school academic preparation, faculty gender composition, and major returns have little effect on major switching behaviors, and that women and men are equally likely to change their major in response to poor grades in major-related courses. Moreover, women in male-dominated majors do not exhibit different patterns of switching behaviors relative to their male colleagues."
Furthermore current recruitment efforts to attract more women tend to be counterproductive. In an interview, the primary author says:
"Society keeps telling us that STEM fields are masculine fields, that we need to increase the participation of women in STEM fields, but that kind of sends a signal that it's not a field for women, and it kind of works against keeping women in these fields."
One of our female students told me that the women are interviewed endlessly, for one project or another: "tell us about your experience", "are you doing ok", "have you experienced sexism", and on, and on. That alone is enough to make them question their career choice.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @10:33PM (21 children)
All these programs start way too late. As long as parents are giving dolls to little girls and blocks to little boys, these problems will continue. You can't fix the problem in the workplace, college, or even highschool. You have to start as soon as the kid can walk. Provide a variety of options, and let them pick. If a girl wants Legos and trucks or a boy wants to go to the Disney princess day, let them. When everyone truly gets to choose, we can stop counting numbers and it's moot whether James Damore was right.
You can't bake gender roles into kids for the first twelve years, then suddenly expect them to forget all that as soon as they become adolescents - right when they are really starting to care.
When I was a boy, sometimes I played with my mom's makeup and sometimes I read young adult fiction for girls. It didn't turn me into a girl and it didn't make me gay - not that there would be anything wrong with that. But it did mean that I had a little bit of an advantage understanding girls and women as I got older. What is wrong with that?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday September 07 2017, @10:52PM (9 children)
In fact I'd argue that it's exactly this wierd modern hyper-sexualization of children (which is one part of a more general hyper-sexualization in general) that causes these things, which should be quite straightforward and not particularly stressful, into nightmares for the children to go through.
This little blurb is rather apropos: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/fdr-grew-up-in-a-dress-it-wasnt-always-blue-for-boys-and-pink-for-girls/237299/
There's absolutely no reason to start attributing sex-roles (what is often today called by the misnomer of 'gender') to children before they actually start to develop sexually. Getting the parents obsessed with signalling their offsprings potential sexuality from infancy was a marketing coup that resulted in great profits for manufacturers of childrens clothing and other items, but it has done our culture no favors at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Justin Case on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:03PM (8 children)
Yes I've always found it odd that for almost every newborn the first data point announced is "boy" or "girl". Who cares? Nobody is going to be fucking that rugrat for well over a decade (we can hope) so why is it so important to know what stuff they got on day one?
This preoccupation with categorizing everyone immediately must be really tough for those born with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_genitalia [wikipedia.org] and other anomalies -- and their families.
P.S. Is it possible to discriminate against a female based on gender if you don't know she's female?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:35PM
Sexuality is supposed to be something that grows from within you, and fills the world. In the beginning you're "innocent" in the strict sense of the word, you're without sexuality. Then your bodies change, you start to acquire sexual features, at first more or less muscle mass, more or less long-bone development, awkward little differences arise. And as time goes on, those turn into sexuality. This is a process, a journey, that shouldn't just be skipped over. As a culture we're laying full-blown sexual identities on toddlers, and then we wonder why they grow up kinky and confused?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @12:00AM (5 children)
It's pretty much the only thing that can be learned about the baby at birth that isn't a cause for concern. "The baby likes milk and poops a lot? How fascinating!" isn't a thing. And if the baby has the wrong number of fingers or isn't the expected color, nobody is celebrating. So it gives everyone a way to share in the joy of the birth.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday September 08 2017, @12:21AM (4 children)
Baby is healthy and normal. How is that not good news?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @12:50AM (3 children)
It's good, but it's not usually news. Doesn't tell you anything about them. If half of babies had two arms and the other half had four, we'd have number-of-arms reveal parties for them.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday September 08 2017, @01:54AM (2 children)
Well my point was that it *is* news, and in fact it's good news, although you probably wouldn't want to phrase it in exactly the way quoted.
I suspect simply because of our personal pronoun system it would in fact be awkward (though certainly not impossible) to make the announcement without also announcing the sex of the infant in the process - which is fine too. I'm not saying cover it up. But treating it as the central news seems really creepy.
"If half of babies had two arms and the other half had four, we'd have number-of-arms reveal parties for them. "
Would we? Why? In my experience people with newborns have enough to do what with feeding and cleaning and dealing with teething and so forth, there will be plenty of time for parties later.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday September 08 2017, @08:29AM (1 child)
I suspect GP was thinking of post-ultrasound baby showers, rather than the situation after birth.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday September 08 2017, @08:44AM
That's even creepier.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @11:21AM
> Yes I've always found it odd that for almost every newborn the first data point announced is "boy" or "girl". Who cares? Nobody is going to be fucking that rugrat for well over a decade (we can hope) so why is it so important to know what stuff they got on day one?
Because 5 year old boys can't get pregnant, but 5 year old girls can (shouldn't, but can).
(Score: 5, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Thursday September 07 2017, @10:55PM (1 child)
All these programs start way too late. As long as parents are giving dolls to little girls and blocks to little boys, these problems will continue.
My parents always tell me this story. I don't actually remember it, personally:
Apparently I was wandering around the cul-de-sac pushing around a pink baby/doll stroller.
This bothered one of the neighboring men so much he runs out into the street to confront me about it.
No idea what he was going to say but once he approaches me he looks down into the stroller and sees that I'm using it to carry all my toy guns.
He was totally fine with that.
That's just so wrong on so many different levels it's amazing!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 08 2017, @03:17AM
You must live in my neighborhood (or one just like it.) The quickest way to be offered a free beer around here is to put an NRA bumpersticker on your truck.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday September 07 2017, @10:59PM
I remember hearing someone posting that in their experience, starting to get girls interested in STEM before a certain age (10? 12?). After that, they start getting interested in boys (?) and the window is gone.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday September 08 2017, @08:53AM (3 children)
Or maybe we should start even earlier than toys: baby clothes.
I'm a father to two young children, one of each gender. For the first (daughter) we had a full set of hand-me-down clothes from family, for the second (son) we've had some passed on by a friend.
For our daughter, the newborn clothes were mainly white or neutral colours (for shoppers that don't know in advance what gender to expect) but from 3 months onward pink became the major theme. Much of the pink stuff never came out of the drawer, and while shopping for clothes for her over the years I've made a point of browsing both the boys and girls racks. Her current favourite top is a dark blue polo shirt with Thomas the Tank Engine on the front. Definitely from the boys' aisle, but she looks great in it and loves it.
As for our son, we just got a bag of 6-9 month hand-me-downs last week. Of the two dozen or so items, all but one were some shade of blue. Sheer monotony. The exception was a green and white striped t-shirt, and even that had a blue collar to it!
(I particularly enjoyed discussing social influence on gender colours with my ten year-old niece recently. She was surprised to learn that boys used to be dressed in red/pink and girls in blue. As I told her: pink is only a girl's colour because people have decided that pink should be a girl's colour.)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 08 2017, @04:04PM (2 children)
(I particularly enjoyed discussing social influence on gender colours with my ten year-old niece recently. She was surprised to learn that boys used to be dressed in red/pink and girls in blue. As I told her: pink is only a girl's colour because people have decided that pink should be a girl's colour.)
I've had that conversation with several adults in the last year or so after reading about it. All of them had never heard this either and were surprised and possibly somewhat disbelieving.
As for our son, we just got a bag of 6-9 month hand-me-downs last week. Of the two dozen or so items, all but one were some shade of blue. Sheer monotony.
Sounds a whole lot like adult men's clothing these days. Sheer monotony, extremely boring, all generally dark shades of blue or black or gray. Men who wear more colorful clothing as whispered to be gay.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday September 08 2017, @04:47PM
Or maybe some of us just don't feel like wearing blaze orange because it's too "hey everybody look at me!"
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday September 08 2017, @07:45PM
Yeah, one thing I really like about Amazon is that the selection, and therefore the color availability, is about a thousand times better.
I'm not planning to fuck any of the whisperers, so I really couldn't give a crap what they think.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday September 08 2017, @04:18PM (3 children)
The STEM problem is more specific than sexualized upbringing. It's about how much you know before you even start classes. Playing with LEGOs only gets you so far - at some point the kid has to upgrade to Mindstorms robots or make a web page for themselves on webs.com or make a Game Maker project or hook up to a family media server or something.
When I started college, there was a very different (and broader) collection of Com Sci students in the first year than in later years. A lot of people fell back to the more "IT" type major, and a lot of people switched out of computing entirely. Why? Because they just didn't get it. But the real question isn't why these freshmen didn't get it. The real question is why anybody else did.
And the answer to that, encoded in who remained, is prior experience. Nearly everyone who stayed in the program had learned to write code before their "Intro to Object-Oriented [Java] Programming" class. So they, much like myself, were mostly learning a new syntax for existing concepts.
The people with no experience, however, struggled to keep up. They were learning syntax and concepts at the same time, and were not given enough time to do so. The support was there, but for various reasons was not adequate (primarily because freshmen still haven't figured out how to maneuver the university model of giving support).
The lecture hall educational model requires that people be able to learn by brute force; if it isn't clicking, just study harder and you can memorize your way through the hard classes. But that doesn't work for programming. In programming, you need open ended problems and way too much time. You need to learn by making mistakes, and it helps if your mistakes are even slightly entertaining (huh, this sprite keeps moving right and clipping through all the walls for some reason) rather than arcane (wtf does "syntax error - PHP expects T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" mean???). And you need to feel like you are in control, when our tools are very good at controlling the hard stuff for us instead of just making the hard stuff easier.
I don't have a solution to this problem, but I know it is the problem. It explains the lack of women in tech, because it's a rare girl that has the kind of social opportunity to work on computers that boys do. It also explains the lack of diversity in tech, because lower income families just can't afford the kind of tools necessary to get any experience before school. And it further explains why there just isn't a large pool of software hires in general, because half the men interested in computers drop out because they hadn't been interested in it soon enough.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday September 08 2017, @07:49PM (2 children)
What is this "social opportunity" of which you speak?
For FSM sake, buy a damn $200 computer. All the software you need to provide a lifetime of learning is free. Web tutorials too.
What, you mean nobody has computers anymore? Just monkey-mirrors ("smart" phones)?
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday September 11 2017, @05:54PM (1 child)
Social opportunity: having the free time and social support to pursue something, rather than stigma not to. Money is not the issue. Friends and family, as well as competing priorities, are.
Many of us never would have gotten into computers if we had vibrant social lives at the time. Amount of social activity in childhood is strongly influenced by gender to the point where boys just have way more time to spend pursuing their own interests by themselves.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Monday September 11 2017, @06:33PM
It is almost as if girls would rather socialize while boys would rather make stuff.
Again, there can be equal opportunity but when different people make different choices only a totalitarian police state can dictate equal outcomes... usually by making sure everyone fails together.