The Trouble with Barbie Science

Try playing with a 2-year-old girl sometime. If you build her a tower made out of blocks, is she going to patiently nurture and protect it like a good mother-figure, or hit it to watch the blocks go flying? Little girls love destruction every bit as much as little boys.

When they get a little bit older we start seeing different behavior. Little girls play with dolls because we buy them dolls. Little girls wear dresses because we buy them dresses. Little girls start emulating princesses because all the little-girl movies we let them watch have princesses as role models. Fart jokes will still be hilarious for a while, but eventually that becomes "gross boy stuff". Yes, there is evidence that male and female minds work differently, but we certainly do our best to force them to develop along different paths!

Physics and math are tools for understanding and manipulating the universe around us. If you want to get young students interested in math and physics, don't try to get them to understand a deep proof about why 1+1=2. Fire some balls at each other and then get them to calculate momentum transfer. It's in human nature to enjoy seeing stuff like that happen, and understanding it so we can control how that stuff happens in new and entertaining ways is a phenomenal motivator.

Painting a physics text-book pink isn't going to work any better on girls than painting it blue would on boys. Girls like more of the same stuff that boys do than we usually think. It's human nature to like those things. The problem is that some of the lessons girls are taught about what it is to be female contradict their human nature. Painting the book pink is an attempt to appeal to girls via the faulty lessons they've learned. Instead of doing that, we need to help them unlearn those faulty lessons and appeal to their human nature. e.g. Little girls should like explosions too.