[miri]

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. 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. "Encouraging workshops" sounds a bit condescending to me. If they'd treat people the same from the start and let it go on a bit so that even a parental generation has grown up with it, it'll probably even out the numbers a bit. Okay, so more boys than girls have good abilities in the STEM fields, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't treat everyone the same.

[DaniFong]

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]

>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]

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]

>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?

[MichaelSalib]

Oh so not having observed a claimed bias that is inherently unobservable

I'm not talking about inherently unobservable behavior: I'm talking about things like publicly telling female students that women can't be good engineers or scientists. I think public statements like that, made in front of an entire class, are very much observable. Don't you agree?

not having made this observation makes me a misogynist

I never said you were a misogynist. My working theory is that in conversation, women might be disinclined to share stories with you about how authority figures in their lives discouraged them from pursuing technical careers because you sound like the kind of person who is committed to the belief that sexism doesn't exist or is not significant. I mean, given the bizarre lengths you go to in order to defend this particular bigot, I can't imagine you'd be very sympathetic to such stories....

Perhaps my scientific wants mean that I require proof where others are willing to accept hearsay and anecdote.

Perhaps. Your scientific wants are certainly not requiring you to write intelligible english prose.

You seem confused so let me explain. I never suggested that the story I presented was representative of all teachers. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite of that. What I actually said was: it is false to claim that there does not exist a single person who has ever told young women that women can't do well in science and engineering. To disprove claims of that nature, all I need is one single anecdote. That's it. And that's what I presented.

Approaching your anecdotal evidence as a crime, as what you claim surely is

Huh? There was no crime here. Being an ignorant ass is not against the law.

one might ask what the motivation of the alleged offender was - why would it matter to a teacher what sex the student is.

Because he was a bigot? In general, I don't expect all people to behave rationally all the time, so the notion that some people will occasionally act like bigots doesn't really surprise me. Do you find it surprising?

Are you sure that the teacher didn't just dislike your [now] wife; you're not yourself biased?

I suppose it is possible. But if that were true, I would have expected him to say "even though you scored highest, you can't be captain because I don't like you". In any event, this theory is not consistent with the fact that long before this incident, the teacher claimed that women could not be good at science and engineering. The simplest explanation that fits all the data is that he really believes the statement he made about women being no good at science and engineering and that when confronted with evidence that this belief was false, he decided to deny reality and claim my wife was unqualified.

What did her parents say, or were they complicit?

Why would any of that matter? My point was that a real live female was discouraged from pursuing a technical career by a bigoted authority figure. Your comment seemed to suggest that such occurrences do not happen. Regardless of what her parents did, this incident proves that such occurrences do happen.

Don't schools in your country care about abuse of power?

Ha ha you're funny! No, they do not.

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.

She made a number of points, but the instructor was not swayed. Which is as you would expect: bigotry is irrational. If you really believe that women are incapable of doing science or engineering, there is nothing that a female student can say that will change your mind.

Is it possible that the teacher was attempting to motivate her, this sort of thing does happen.

Look, I don't know why you're so desperately scrambling to defend a bigot, but it is really creepy. Telling a woman that women can't be good engineers does not motivate them. In general, lying to people is not a good way to motivate them. Telling a woman that despite her superior performance, she won't be permitted to exercise leadership, will not motivate her.

What school was it, who was the teacher?

Why do you want to know?

[pbhjpbhj]

>I'm not talking about inherently unobservable behavior: I'm talking about things like publicly telling female students that women can't be good engineers or scientists. I think public statements like that, made in front of an entire class, are very much observable. Don't you agree?

To nitpick, your anecdote was a presented as a private conversation. Certainly where I am a teacher that told a class that their subject was not for girls/women would be severely reprimanded.

The question at hand is institutionalised sexism - a single instance of apparent bias against a single individual doesn't show that the scientific/engineering establishment nor even the educational establishment [in your country, USA it seems] is biased against females from entering the field.

>you sound like the kind of person who is committed to the belief that sexism doesn't exist or is not significant

I practice sexism myself. I'm more inclined to hold doors for women, I'm more inclined to assist women with traditionally male chores like fixing the car or computer.

The only institutionalised sexism I've observed in education has been special programmes and events put on to encourage women to do things that for whatever reason they've chosen not to do. In business there are programmes for women and extra financial help that isn't available to men. These things are not removing biases they are instigating them.

>You seem confused so let me explain. I never suggested that the story I presented was representative of all teachers. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite of that. What I actually said was: it is false to claim that there does not exist a single person who has ever told young women that women can't do well in science and engineering

So your point then is that there is no institutional bias, that this one bad thing happened to your wife and that is the reason their should now be discrimination against boys/men wanting to do science and engineering and for women regardless of an individuals propensities and abilities. Great.

>>What school was it, who was the teacher? >Why do you want to know? Why not, knowledge is power.

[miri]

Like MichaelSalib says, they're definitely out there, and sometimes they're our teachers. I've got female classmates who have routinely been graded one grade lower in than their male classmates IT class in high school - despite being as good or better than them. It rectified itself at the exams, since they're anonymous, but things like this still happen all over the place - and my classmates are the ones that persevered, and still started a master's programme in computer engineering. We've all experienced this to some degree (we've been asking around), which is probably a contributing factor to the fact that having 11 girls in a class of 120 is a whopping high for our course.

Just because people are different and want different things is not an excuse to be condescending to anyone based on gender. That's what I'm getting at.