Edit: I stand corrected, apparently there are big movements to get males into the professions I mentioned. Just that I never heard about these movements.
This actually is a common conversation within those fields, and is certainly viewed as a problem in wider society. Some researchers claim that one reason male students underperform in school is due to the lack of adult male role models in the form of teachers. As a male with some experience in education, I have seen first hand how much my very presence in the classroom can inspire young male students. They yearn for more male teachers, and they don't even know anything about education theory or developmental psychology.
I'm not a huge fan of many new action movies, but I'm also quite happy seeing people who (in the past) claimed Tolkien or comic books are for nerds only, happily go to see the LotR and Marvel/DC movies now. Movies these days can be criticised for many things - but putting a strong female character in a sci-fi world from time to time is quite a welcome change. (yeah, I know it's not done properly every time, but the shift is visible)
>I chose computers because [...] they interested me more than most other things (sports, history, friends, ...)
This sounds very sad to me. How do you mean that computers interested you more than friends? I don't see how anyone could come to say this.
>social perceptions about geeks are changing, thanks to shows like Big Bang Theory
I think TBBT is doing more harm than good to the "geek culture", whatever you want to call the "geek culture". What it's doing is enforce and rehash the stupid "nerd stereotypes" of the old, but somehow present it as "being cool". The world doesn't need that. All cultures need less poseurs, not more.
I didn't think I'd ever cite Maddox on HN, but I agree with him spot on. Take a look: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd
[Citation needed]. What you're seeing in school is very likely the effect of early age socialization effects. Which can go both ways, if you look at other cultures, such as Iceland [1]. You may also want to familiarize yourself with the concept of "stereotype threat" [2].
> You never hear of the need to get more male nurses, or primary teachers and that is generally not viewed as a problem.
As a matter of fact, this is a source of concern in the relevant circles [3, 4]. For example, much has been written about boys not having enough male role models among teachers in schools. It just doesn't get much coverage in the media because, well, these are considered low-end jobs that few people other than those involved in nursing and teaching care much about. In fact, that is a major theme: If a type of job is dominated by women, it's likely to be poorly paid (stereotypically male jobs can go either way).
[1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1032361...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
[3] http://www.edutopia.org/male-teacher-shortage
[4] http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2013/02/21/is-the-short...
There are many citations in there. I don't remember who the researchers were though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#Increasing_numbe...
I'd appreciate if you'd read something: http://reelgirl.com/2013/11/im-not-a-pilot-im-a-pilots-wife-...
Edit: It's telling when people downvote a comment that is nothing but a relevant link. This is a situation in which you either have convictions and are willing to defend them, or are knowingly ignorant about the subject and are willing to try to learn and engage in discourse. If those options feel constricting, all you have to do is close the tab.
As for why you believe there isn't a demand for these things, it's basically confirmation bias. You don't personally hear a need for more people in these sectors so you assume the need doesn't exist. But in fact there's been a lot more need for nurses in the past decade, so male nurses would definitely be welcomed in terms of increasing the applicants for those jobs. Teachers less so because they have a hard enough time making ends meet with miniscule budgets without adding more teachers to the roles.
All these industries are different and have different motivators as to whom they try to get more jobs to. But behind any great push to get more people into an industry you'll probably find economic motivators, not a demand for social justice. So focus less on the fact that it's women, and focus more on the fact that it's half the population not going after STEM jobs.
At the graduate level, the RAND institute concluded that the American aversion to STEM degrees is rational and market-driven:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
A professor at the University of Washington, William Zumeta, reaches a similar conclusion
http://www.issues.org/19.2/p_zumeta.htm
Now, STEM is broad, and software development is a different thing. But a lot of people are surprised to learn that the median wage for registered nurses in San Jose ($122,990) is actually higher than it is for software developers in San Jose ($116,610). In San Francisco, dental hygienists earn 106K a year, only a bit less than software developers (110K a year). I don't really have any problem with this, I'm happy that these workers make good salaries, but it is remarkable that we talk about the urgency of getting more people into an field where there is a severe shortage when other fields in these high cost areas earn about the same amount, and perhaps with considerably better career security as you enter middle age.
(see http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings)
There are good reasons to want to do one or the other, but I certainly wouldn't say that the intangibles clearly break in favor of software development. Silicon valley leaders act like the shortage of STEM workers or software developers is a foregone conclusion. I'm not saying that there's no case to be made for it, but I the evidence suggests that salaries in software development are not remarkable on average, and there are considerable career risks long term.
We need to consider the possibility that avoidance of STEM is actually a very economically rational decision for a high talent student. It may be why Americans are avoiding the field, and it may be why women are avoiding it.
Of course we come across more articles about women in tech because we frequent tech forums. But the topic (of men in nursing, teaching etc) do come up on the relevant forums.
On the contrary, this is discussed frequently on HN: both the claim that there are no efforts to get men into nursing or primary teaching, and the fact that indeed there are. It gets brought up so often that it's almost a cliché, with people joking about writing bots for it and so on.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=men+nursing#!/comment/forever/0/me...
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=male+nurses#!/comment/sort_by_date...
Very poor comparison.
The idea of interwoving them sounds a little bit silly: a sci-fi text will bore a student who is literature-oriented in the same way that a mathematical model of romance will sound cheesy to a math nerd.
1. http://techpageone.dell.com/business/study-women-stem-career...
It's even worse in teen TV, where the smart female characters are more often portrayed as being love interests for male characters over being smart.
And lets not even get into the rampant sexism in most mainstream video games (and their communities), even more important for software engineering and computer science since modding/making/playing video games seems to be a common factor for many male entrants, and relatively uncommon among female entrants to the field (at least in my recent but anecdotal experience).
This all leads to a situation where computers, engineering, science, and math are more often seen as male disciplines. We may have cleaned up a lot of blatant sexism, especially in modern workplaces, but our media is still teaching our children gender bias, often with a detrimental effect for both genders (for example decreasing college rates for males, how many male teen characters care about getting into college, have their shit together, etc).
It may mean that what the campaign thinks is right is not what people want. It doesn't help that social sciences research on the subject is kind of taboo.
Another possible explanation is that perhaps there is cultural pressure on middle-class men to make a lot of money, regardless of how much pain is involved in getting said money. If you are only getting an undergrad degree, a STEM degree is probably the most remunerative course of action you have open to you.
Now, my perception is that society puts a lot less pressure on middle-class women when it comes to making money... but I'm not a woman; it is quite possible that my perception here is in error.
Hey, while not dolls, I had great fun with my teddy bears as a kid. Served up some mean teddy bear picnics. With the participation of my sister, made some teddy bear magazines for them to read. My mother baked them some miniature cakes. Of course, the bears went parachuting and such too.
Actually, I remember now, before Lego I had some large wooden bricks. Building towers and bridges was pretty neat. Playing physics based puzzle games is still great fun!
Computers were fun to me because I played games and was motivated to maximize the meager capabilities of my IBM XT, and wanted to cheat in games. So I learned all sorts of things there.
In computer class, there was no exploration, no fun. Oregon Trail was cool, but didn't capture the imagination.
I hated Math in school for many years, but my grandfather tutored me. Then I discovered puzzles and how to apply math to problems that had some relevance to me.
Look at the message, it is about how computers are fun and empowering. Even with this general message, they still market to girls by simply showing how women and girls are involved with coding. The target of the campaign is girls, but the message is universal that girls don't feel like outsiders and even boys can tag along.
You simply cannot have the same experience with a sealed, black box, computing device like an iPad, Surface, or Chromebook. I hesitate to even call them "computers" since they're so unlike the computers I built as a child.
So could one say that we do need to focus on girls, to the extent that we recognize the socialization they receive in a society where gender roles are a thing? I agree with the article in general -- though I don't see anything wrong with programs for girls who have already found themselves teenaged and without the resources to get the necessary programming/STEM experience, and/or being uncomfortable around teenage boys in a field that the boys have been taught is their turf.
The media should promote some more female STEM role models. It would make up for the years of degredation and exclusion of women in STEM on TV, in the movies, etc -- especially in kid's media, where girls and women are usually token side-characters when they aren't princesses (see reelgirl.com for thorough documentation). It'll never happen, of course, despite that it would hurt no one, because the necessary critical thinking, along with the knowledge of women's history, to keep ourselves from shouting "gender bias!!!" at anything helping women succeed, is absent.
Even without such a study it should be intuitive that steering neurotypical (in the broad sense) boys toward typically female preferences and activities, and vice versa, will end up being cruel along some margin.
(Just as it's certainly cruel for an atypical girl to be forced into typically female behaviors and preferences, which is what you're describing.)
The question is, where's the margin?
The synopses of the book that are on the internet don't inform of the degree to which it's an actual study by a sociologist; it's not a pop-parenting book.
Is there a reason to suspect that tackling both of these at the same time (e.g., demographic specific initiatives) yields significant benefit over alternatives?
If you treat a field as gendered in your recruiting of kids, the sum of your efforts may ultimately balance the scales more than they're self-defeating. But don't think for a moment kids are stupid enough to hear a gender-specific, or gender-targeted introduction/recruitment to some field and not walk away with some notion that a field is "for" a specific gender, or that one is "better" at it than another.
As usual, the actual problem is deeper than symtomatic entities like LEGO. We will see the end of this issue when we see the end of the world's obsession with sex and sex stereotypes.
I believe this is one of the main issues. We tell kids they can "be whatever you want to be", and then look at a girl funny when she wants to be an engineer or make fun of a boy for wanting to be a nurse. Society has ingrained certain ideas into what a person in a given career looks like that people are deterred (consciously or subconsciously) from that career if they don't fit the norm.
For example, what is the first image that pop's into your head when you think of a nurse? This seems to be one of the fields that has been pushed so hard into a female career in our societal consciousness, that an entire genre of porn exists around this single occupation (I want my male naughty nurse Halloween costume, damn it!).
It's at a point where societal norms would need to be broken down from the ground up, with regards to gender roles and careers, starting with kids.
Computer science for instance is sitting behind a desk all day every day more or less constantly using your brain and concentrating. This is kind of a bad choice of occupation even though it appeals to some and has some upsides.
We know from the "pay gap" that women's lower pay is balanced by fewer hours, shorter commute, better environment, and other benefits of that kind; there's essentially no actual discrimination for the same work. This makes me wonder whether women are choosing this result, or whether men are steered away from working easier, less well-paying jobs.
It could be that women aren't going into STEM in equal numbers simply because they have subjectively better choices available. If that's the case, then programs to equalize the numbers will doubly discriminate against men by being forced into it in the first place and then getting less compensation in the second.
