SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.