Why Women Don't Stem?
(vs her brother) ...
"It's because we have been brought up in two utterly different worlds.
Living with my little brother allows me to see this -... I know what his life has been like.
But we do not -- even though we share the same parents, and toilet. From birth, men and women are installed with different software. We are given different information. Our worldviews have totally different frameworks.
If you compare the pile of books and magazines by our beds, you see how this happens. When Andrew was thirteen, the floor by his bed was heaped with gaming magazines, and books about physics. He liked physics, his Xbox, and he read books and magazines solely about how to be good at physics -- and about how to play Xbox.
He had no choice in this -- there are no "general interest" magazines for teenage boys. A boy in a newsagent is faced with specialist titles -- on music, gaming, fishing, film, martial arts, etc. -- and so gains a worldview dictated by mono-interest, clannish communities, dedicated to becoming good at "a thing." In newsagents, this is made clear by simple categorization: "men's magazines" are racked together under the title "Men's Interests." Men have interests. You pick your thing; you dedicate yourself to it. You see the whole world through your specialist subject. You concentrate on becoming good at your thing -- and that is how you become successful. This is the way of men.
By way of contrast, the newsagent's racks for female periodicals are titled "Women's Lifestyle." Men have interests -- women have lives. Lives they must strive to perfect. As a consequence, the magazines heaped by my bed were there to guide me through a world where it was presumed I would have to become knowledgeable about a whole range of things that would give me not an interest, but a life. And a stylish life, at that. And that is how you beocme successful if you are a woman."