I believe this article (Why We Don't Need More Women in Technology...Yet) says it nicely:
I can relate to this a lot. Sure I had a large amount of Barbies and other dolls but I also had a good-sized Lego collection that I used to make little cities and houses, lots of houses. This turned into building doll houses, which turned into my bachelor's in architectural engineering, which turned into plumbing engineering, which turned into my master's in environmental engineering, which brings me to where I am now: my PhD in engineering. I doubt I would have been in a STEM-field today if I had stuck with making stories up and having my Barbies act them out.Before you retort with your personal vote of support for female education, I’d ask you to take a stroll around a toy store and imagine you can’t read. Imagine, if you will, that you’ve been taught a simple system of color-coding: Pink and purple is for girls, and blue, green and gray are for boys.
You will immediately notice the drastic segregation — the gendered version of the Jim Crow-era South. There are entire aisles of pink, and other aisles devoted to dark blues and greens. Imagine that you are only “allowed” in the pink and purple areas of the store, and examine the toys you find there.
The vast majority of playthings for little girls encourage them to think about nurturing others and caring for themselves — including, to a large extent, their appearances. These aren’t inherently negative lessons to learn, except for the fact that these lessons exclude others that deal with problem-solving, strategy, physics… you know, the kinds of things you learn from playing with Lego, K’nex, Stratego and other male gender-coded games and toys.
I haven't made up my mind completely about the other article I read yesterday (Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Telling People How they Should Feel About it) but it did make the comment:
Marina Martin, a business consultant, agrees with Schappell. “If you really want to see more uteri in tech, grab your nearest 3-year-old girl and make damn sure she’s around computers all the time.”I'll agree with that. So much of our thoughts/ideas/impressions about how things should be start when we're little. No one can dispute that the younger years are crucial for development. But this also terrifies me for if/when I have children of my own. So much pressure!
There is so much pressure for parents of both genders to expose kids to the "right" stimuli. As the mom of a girl, and a former engineer turned almost doctor, I know the importance of encouraging STEM education. But I think it goes both ways, too. I think it's just as important for boys to spend time in the kitchen and learn to cook. And we have to let kids be themselves, too. Otherwise we end up with a bunch of eventual-adults that are miserable in jobs that they went into because that was what they thought their parents wanted them to do/study.
ReplyDeleteI get your point. And I agree with you. But I doubt there's going to be as much risk of young girls born today NOT having exposure to technology. I think more of the effort needs to be placed on just encouraging imagination and curiosity no matter which aisle we're shopping in. :)
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