[username90]

> Hi, yes it is hard to understand. If you are a child and you see an example of people of all backgrounds working together to do science, including people that look and behave like you do, and your take away from this is "Welp, I clearly am not welcome here." then you need mentoring help from an adult to prop up your self-esteem.

You are grossly misrepresenting the problem here. I grew up in the 90's in a more progressive country than the US and there were plenty of science events that I thought would be cool to attend which were girls only (almost all of them actually, not many events for kids here). My spot on a science competition team was given to a girl since the competition required at least one girl on each team. Also it seems like people taking stock photos loves including girls and women in them. Every time I got to the next level I was surprised over how there were so few girls there, nothing I learned stated that women were not common in STEM as I grew up.

When you go through all of that, is it really that strange you start believing that the odds are stacked against you? And is it strange that when every time you hear "equality" they go on to say "boys need to take a step back in favor of girls", that you read it as boys need not apply? So when almost every job posting is asking for "equality", what you read is "boys need not apply" because that was what it always meant before. I don't care what the exact definition of these terms means, in practice this is what boys hear when they grow up in such an environment. And when you get ghosted by such job postings explicitly encouraging equal representation, then it is very easy to assume that they ghosted you due to your gender.

Anyhow, all of this has lead to nobody taking the shortage of women in STEM seriously, I mean this has been going on for around 30 years and they still can't attract girls to these programs...