I wasted four years of my life – don't make the same mistake
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects, but I had my mind set on a life fulfilled by the arts.
And in the next paragraph:
> Without realising it, I was a victim of a gender stereotype reinforced since birth, that men do science and maths and women do arts or languages.
Society was encouraging her to go into the sciences. Or was it that she was trapped by a "gender stereotype"?
She doesn't see the contradiction between the two statements.
She could have accepted personal responsibility, and said "I screwed up. I didn't look into the job prospects, or the salaries. I just had a romantic notion and went with it, against the advice of people who knew better."
> Now I have a five-year-old daughter. I don't want her to blindly follow gender roles the way I did.
Is she an adult, or an automaton with no free will?
> I want her to embrace the fact that a science or technical degree will not limit her creativity but expand it and broaden her horizons far more than my arts background could
i.e. "I was bigoted against STEM degress, but now I realize that they're useful, too".
This article is interesting. Not for it's promotion of STEM degrees. But for it's shameless bigotry, and total denial of personal responsibility.
>"I just had a romantic notion"
This is just where the socialisation manifests itself. Social conditioning is just that, undetectable (by definition) changes in your own perceptions, rather than coercion from authority.
"Computer science, technology and physics just did not figure in my teenage world view. Nobody popular in my school chose to study those subjects."
She gave more weight to the peer pressure from other teenage girls, especially from the popular girls, than she gave to the word of her teacher. Not very uncommon.
Peer pressure on what is considered "cool" vs. "lame" is a strong force in teenagers. I don't know if it's fair to say that every teenager who is not immune to that is not accepting personal responsibility.
You have to stand out. You have to do what the others are not doing - and make a stand for it. And you will get noticed. For example if everyone in your class smokes, and you politely decline everytime you are asked to, people will notice. If everyone wants to do a PhD but you think of it as a waste of time and want to get out, people will notice.
And people will even follow you.
When you are growing up I think it's very difficult for kids and teenagers to avoid pressure especially for something as prevalent as this. I feel like "nerd" fashion is in so you see that a lot in society as rappers and athletes sport that look so that aspect of the nerd life is acceptable presently.
The other aspects of nerdery that might not be socially acceptable to teenagers are playing with robots, programming a web app, and building a mobile application. To me if you like doing things like that you are probably the type of person okay with going into computer science or engineering.
Until that's just as socially acceptable as joining the football team I doubt you're going to see much mindset change around the idea of going into engineering vs traditional liberal arts.
To give it some perspective, in 1942 there were 18 year-olds fighting in the war. The people then were under tremendous pressure. They had enormous responsibilities and enormous independence, compared to today.
What changed?
Are we supposed to expect that at 18, she's ready to live on her own, sleep with anyone she chooses, join the military, but she's still a child, and can't muster the wits or guts to fight peer pressure.
I, for one, have higher standards. It's demeaning (IMHO) to deny her own responsibility in her actions.
What do you think of her opinion now? She's clearly older, maybe in her thirties. And she's still denying all personal responsibility for her actions.
When I was 18 I did stupid things, and I'm adult enough to admit they were stupid things. Why can't she make the same admission?
Your privilege is showing: if you are born male, it's easy to forget that for every teacher pushing a STEM career there are many more people – often close relatives, family friends, respected community members, etc. – who encourage traditional gender roles in their choice of toys, activities, and interaction with adults. This isn't usually an overt process but it's a constant background tide: if you have a young female relative, watch how many times toys are oriented towards looking good vs. doing anything constructive or what happens if she asks too many questions. It's quite disturbing once you're actually paying attention.
You can blame every individual for not recognizing this and correcting it early but the only denial I see is yours. It's particularly galling to see your repeated whine about admitting mistakes when someone reading for comprehension would have realized that the entire article was an extended version of “I should have listened to my teachers rather than the people who convinced me science wasn't for women”.
"Your privilege is showing: if you are born male" - This pisses me beyond anything. What "privilege"? "Privilege" of having to admit my own mistakes and take personal responsibility for every step I take? So what if there are people "who encourage traditional gender roles"? (IMPLYING that gender roles are bad) Whose fault is it that you got "scammed" by these people and lost 4 years? Be happy that you figured out "scam" and take responsibility for falling for it.
What is more, this "privilege" offends me personally. I am male from poor country and poor family. I had "privilege" of getting education without any money (Did being man helped me to survive on 4sausages and 2 slices of bread a day? No.), I had "privilege" of going against peer pressure and choosing field everyone deemed 'uncool'(Yah, maybe "having balls" do help when it comes to surviving peer pressure). Hell I had "privilege" of getting lower grades in university because I wasn't woman... I just can't stand white handed feminists and white knights saying "check your privilege".
“I should have listened to my teachers rather than the people who convinced me science wasn't for women". No. It's not about that. Article is about "I should have listened to my teachers rather than the people who convinced me science wasn't for women. But I didn't, and I blame men instead of myself."
Quoting from the dictionary: “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.”
In this case, it's a common term (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_(social_inequality)) referring to the fact that challenges are not applied evenly to every group. You had some disadvantages due to being poor but you would have faced even more had you also been poor and female (or gay, disabled, the wrong ethnicity, etc.). None of these are absolute barriers but they require people to spend effort dealing with something their more privileged peers do not – pointing to individuals who succeeded anyway ignores the number of people who give up after years of being worn down by that pressure.
Perhaps you'd recognize the concept better in this formulation: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...
It would have made difference in school as I would have gotten free lunch (somehow free lunch requirements was different in my days for boys and girls. Don't know about now), I would have had more attention from teachers that were interested in teaching girls only (I had ~95% female teachers). In university - males would have helped me to do / would have done my work for me. I would have gotten more attention from few professors that gave extra personal lectures to women and ability to retake exams for women (affirmative action that increased grades of women and thus women had better chance at getting money from university). Also females had lower grade requirements for university stimulus (or is it called grant? Students get it depending on their grades) in first 2 years (after that system became fair... except for professors mentioned before).
From future:
I could use "You don't promote me because I am woman" to get promotion. I could get some free courses in programming for women. I could use all of the affirmative action there is. (I am not even listing small bonuses and support from white knights even when I would be wrong.)
They say "The grass is always greener on the other side". But if I had chance to turn time back and be born girl - I would. Only "privilege" as a man I have is "privilege" of learning to take blows and stand up without anyone running to help me. But I would be happy if you listed my privileges that I have not noticed.
It's what sells. It sells because it's what the children want. The idea that gender is a societal construct is nonsense.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pre...
Make monkeys prefer toy trucks. Female monkeys prefer dolls.
The doctor behind the "gender is a social construct" based it on David Reimer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
He wasn't entirely truthful. David knew from the beginning he was a boy, despite enormous pressure to believe otherwise. He ended up committing suicide.
This kind of gender nonsense kills people. I find it difficult to express just how morally bankrupt it is to deny human nature.
> someone reading for comprehension would have realized that the entire article was an extended version of “I should have listened to my teachers rather than the people who convinced me science wasn't for women”
I'm happy to note that you don't dispute that she did not accept responsibility for her actions. "I should have listened to them" is a far cry from "I made a bad decision".
I'm also happy to note that you also don't dispute she shows bigotry against STEM fields.
I'm someone who did a STEM degree because I thought it would pay the bills. Most of my friends didn't. So... I made new friends in the STEM fields. And I didn't do it by putting down arts people as "artsy-fartsy potheads".
Also good writing (taught by these 'useless' BA degrees) is a damned handy thing to have. I know people that have gone into marketing, tendering, publicity, reporting, technical writing ... the list goes on... it's possibly longer than the one for STEM degrees, which can pin your skills to one sector or role.
edit: quoting her response: "That is an absolutely preposterous article!! If I hadn't studied Spanish and French I couldn't have worked abroad and I wouldn't have the job I have now. Language skills are vital! If she had written this about a history degree then maybe..."
it's also important to point out that your friend's example is a special case. when looking at the value of a particular degree, it's important to consider the full distribution of outcomes.
You didn't waste time. You lived. And now you are judging the younger yourself, and saying "I made mistakes", but you can't know what life would have been if you studied maths. Maybe this article would have the same title, and end with "Don't make mistakes like I do, follow your heart and study art".
But we love to have girls in IT. Welcome.
Spending four years supporting myself playing poker for just-under-minimum-wage on average was a waste of time in terms of career/hard skills, but gave me an instinctive grasp of game theory, excellent budgeting skills, improved my self-confidence and was generally a lot of fun. I don't know if I'd be where I am now without those four wasted years.
EDIT: Oh! I remember the salient point I was going to make - I doubt she'd be earning around £250+ from a Guardian article without that liberal arts degree!
If you like the group study dynamic, join a book club or audit some classes at the local community college or state school. Most of the higher level lit classes have very few students anyways and they'll welcome another voice in the discussion.
Better yet start a book club, or a lit discussion group. Put that tech degree to work and make an online version of this group. If it gets big try and monetize it!
So, assuming like 1 million Americans can code (....might be a bit exaggerated), approximately 99.68% of Americans are illiterate? Holy shit, we're doomed!
As of 2012, 16% of the American population lived in poverty, including 20% of children. Learning to code is difficult enough, and even more so if you are struggling to make enough to eat and keep a roof over your head.
> I was wrong as a young woman to presume that technology was not a creative subject – that's sadly a presumption still shared by a third of school-age girls today.
Many young men also presume technology is not a creative subject. In her case, she was just a regular human being that wasn't interested in computers. This has nothing to do with gender.
You also don't have to be a genius to realize a degree in literature or language isn't going to have a huge job market. There is a market for translators, and being bilingual helps a lot in a variety of fields, but just speaking spanish or french is not a career path. Gender stereotype did not determine she had to pick that degree.
He seems to do alright.
Did, RIP Jobs. Also he was Steve Jobs, who created multiple multi-billion dollar companies, he would have been a success had he taken a burger flipping class.
There was only one Steve Jobs.
Also I disagree with your burger flipper comment, his beliefs were really what made him, him.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jo...
I wonder how many years of his life that wasted?
Do you think the guy might have a horse in this race?
That said, you need food to feed a garden while it is being cultivated, and nothing puts bread on the table quite as robustly as engineering degrees.
Sadly, the liberal arts are dying out (or, in the case of the UK, don't exist at the university level). In such a system, I'd actually encourage people to study the arts, not engineering. It's easy enough to simultaneously learn to code and put bread on the table from that. (Most useful technical skills are learned outside the classroom.)
Until the non-classroom resources for learning the liberal arts rival those for learning CS, in an either-or situation (like the author's) one should definitely study the arts.
There are millenia of materials and practice in the liberal arts available for consumption; there is only perhaps half a century of resources for CS. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that self-schooling liberal arts is possible.
One does wonder why the teaching of liberal arts is dying out--there may well be some systemic issue that is causing worse teaching or relevance. The issue may well lie with the current practice of liberal arts.
I also don't think it's a good idea to push technology as a general field on anyone, gender be damned, if their heart isn't in it. It's good to try your hand to see if that's something you want to follow, but goals without passion fizzle quickly and that may not be enough to support yourself.
There are also cases where people have pursued technology only to feel deeply unfulfilled and/or unchallenged and move on to something else. Just because tech is everywhere, doesn't mean it's the only thing around.
The result thus far has been that we have more ways than ever before to target advertisements and share stupid pictures of ourselves and offer interpretations of rap lyrics. Has this improved western culture, as far as you're concerned?
- doing engineering isn't magically going to change your thought process. Some people don't think the same way as others - they probably wouldn't enjoy engineering if they did it (I don't doubt they could apply themselves to get a degree). You think if Obama did a BEng the world would immediately be black and white and he could just make the "right" decisions?
- engineers aren't the only people who contribute to society, by a long shot. Besides a world with movies, graphic art or music, an all-engineer world would lack all the scholarly products of the modern world. "Guns, Germs and Steel" is an awesome book which is very accessible, and engineers seem to love it. But it was written by a biologist, on the backs of 100s of academics who did the original research he cites. A work like that couldn't exist without "the arts"
"The arts" was probably a bad choice of words, because few people are brazen enough to say art isn't good. Instead they'll say art is a good hobby, surely you can program by day and still write some little operas or something at night. Of course, this completely understates the dedication and focus required to produce a work.
I really wanted to defend the soft sciences: psychology, socioligy , anthro, and other things people on HN don't see the need for.
What I take away from her post is that if you are ambitious in your career (like she seems to be), it is important to understand the realities of your major / concentration. For those that have passions in humanities and other non-"hard" majors, pursue your dream as long as you can accept the statistical likelihoods for your career post-graduation.
My take on the languages side - they are enormously valuable if you bring something else to the table. If all you can do is speak 4 languages, it's novel but doesn't open doors. If you can program Python, price a derivative, or design a bridge - then the language becomes invaluable. Who should we send to talk to the client in Spain? Jane speaks Spanish. Who should set up the support team in Prague? Bill is good with that language and culture stuff.
As for the gender issue, it's much tougher. It's easy to say, "Let's encourage our kids" and a lot starts there. It's hard to change society, but you can always start with the local schools.
However, if you are going to major in history, or English, or something like that you really do need to have a plan from freshman year about how you are going to turn it into a job when you graduate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg5gJxXBh8s
Thinking about it perhaps your son is more into knights, emperors and prophecies than cold war paranoia. It's a great video anyway.
I'm definitely going to watch that video though.
One of my favorite examples was someone I ran into at the NIPS conference years back who was using machine learning to classify the handwriting for manuscripts in the Oxford library collections in an attempt to identify the copyist when that information had been lost over the centuries.
Someone phrased it beautifully that they preferred having CS being their superpower in a different field. I think that's a great plan.
A 1.3% decline means that three fewer girls took A-Level computing this year, doesn't it?
The liberal arts are very much worth doing. I was a liberal arts major, and have three regrets: I should have studied math further (bailed out after multi-variable calculus and differential equations; I should have studied more foreign languages; and I should have realized that computing did not begin and end with Fortran IV entered onto punch cards. (Yes, this was all a while ago.)
I agree with you, they're excellent hobbies.
But not necessarily professions. The notion of "professional artist" is fairly recent. Most of the great artists, pre-20th century, had day jobs: from Chaucer (diplomat, astronomer) to Lewis Carroll (Mathematician).
And, if anything, I'd think that art not being a profession only made their art better. I mean, how much can someone who all he does is write all day can possibly have to say?
Take Asimov, for example. I wonder how interesting his science fiction would have turned out had he not been, first and foremost, an actual scientist?
If you love languages or art, there are certainly ways to support yourself and do them.
I think it's pretty outrageous to say anyone not studying STEM is wasting their time.
Sure, STEM enables our modern infrastructure, but the arts provide the things that just make life better -- movies, stories, music, etc... World would be pretty boring without.
A civilisation dies if it has no culture, nothing is created. We'd become Borg-esque.
On serious note "My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects" she were given choice and good advice. She chose to pursue what seemed best to her, and now she is saying "choices still heavily gender stereotyped". IF she was about to go to engineering and someone would have forced her to choose linguistics THEN it would be "gender stereotypes"/oppression problem. Now it's her inability to think ahead that got her waste 4 years, and it's her inability to accept her own mistake that leads her to cursing "gender stereotypes". I am amazed word "patriarchy" wasn't used in article.
"I'm hoping that my daughter will embrace her inner geek and want to change the world." Suggestion: Instead of pushing to one direction let child explore and choose.
Hellban in: 5... 4..