How to Get Girls into Engineering? Let Them Build Toys
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
I'm glad these two are trying to get more kids into engineering (female or not), but their thesis is pretty hollow on a few fronts. Most importantly that engineering toys lead to engineering kids. But also that engineering toys that currently exist (lego/knex) have some kind of implicit feature that keeps them out of the hands of girls.
[1] http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,0...
Just stop marking every single toy as boy or girl one. Most boyish engineering toys are actually perfect for both sexes, as long as you stop telling girls "it is boys toy, you are not supposed to play with it, see the coloring on the box?". And I heard the last one in toy store and it was idiotic on multiple levels. (Why should anything non-pink be for boys only, really?).
Girls do not need special toys build for them. We need to stop teaching kids that every damn toy is either inherently boyish or girlish.
It gets more intense than just the color changes in toys: Last Christmas gifts I bought my niece and nephew, there were a lot of toys in various price ranges for my nephew, all of which were actual playable toys and selection of types of toys. For my niece, however, mostly dolls, and many of the cheaper toys weren't useful by themselves - they were all accessories for the dolls.
My daughter's only 15 months old - and already I can see other parents treating her differently from the boys. If she's in a crowd of children, she'll get given dolls instead of building blocks.
Obviously I do what I can to counteract this, but she's not always with me. If toys like this encourage other parents to let my daughter play at engineering, I'm all for them.
Serious question.
In an attempt to reduce sexism in STEM, women have come up with sexist engineering toys. Goldie Blox has cute little animal character pieces, and now with Roominate, "[once] the building is built, they can decorate it with the included paper and other embellishments and use the motor to add electrical appliances". Both of them come in colours that are distinctly girly.
Of course, how to provide such nurturing environments for all but the most fortunate in circumstance is the question :(
The fact that Baby Einstein DVDs don't work (worse, they are harmful) tells you nothing about whether engineering toys help or not.
But then as soon as someone somewhere manages to twist reality in a way such that it actually impacts our emotions, e.g. by claiming that it could be your child to suffer this inequality in life, all of a sudden there's an outcry out for regulation to fix that one specific issue with rationality-be-damned and ends-justify-the-means methods.
How about instead we take a step back and look for structural causes for these issues. Chances are that if our society allowed for the tech-industry to be unjstifyably hostile towards women, it also allowed for some generic industry X to be unjstifyably hostile towards some generic group Y of the population. Chances are that if our society allowed for marketing to negatively impact the opportunities that women have later in life, it also allowed for some generic business practice X to negatively impact the opportunities that generic group Y of the population will have later in life.
Given this, what kind of madman would assume that providing an ends-justify-the-means hotfix that solves (or at least tries to solve) the issue for some y (in Y) is the right approach to this?
Or to put it more bluntly, what makes women so much more worthy of our attention compared to all those other groups of people that are struggling in life? Why do they get to fasttrack their issues, rather than have to wait for a structural solution that benefits everyone, just like everybody else too?
Take for example Google. In their diversity report[1] it shows that only 17% of employees in tech related jobs are women. That's something people have talked about for a while and shows a lack of women in tech. We seem to be ignoring the fact however that 94% of Google's tech employees are white or Asian. Only 2% are hispanic and only 1% are black. Why are we ignoring this? As you say we need to step back and look at the bigger problem - lack of diversity - instead of focusing on one specific area (women).
[1] http://www.google.co.uk/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech
Assuming that those demographics are independent of talent or skill, why wouldn't diversity of a population match the diversity of the population as a whole? At least for a large enough company, of which Google (with over 50,000 employees, although not all are in the US) certainly qualifies.
Or to put it another way: if you took 50,000 people at random from the US, then their demographics would closely mirror the demographics of the US as a whole. So if the diversity at a company is very different from that, then something is happening to cause that difference.
If there is a structural solution that is actually doable, by all means, please share. But until then, any pieces that are solvable we should, by all means, solve. Not because one group is more important, but because we shouldn't make people suffer or be discriminated against.
But there are movements to reduce the siffering experienced by different groups.
Why thank you drcross for giving us a demonstration of why women are going to need a little more encouragement than men to get into tech...
"The exceptions to the notion that men dominate society (like Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton) prove that there are no roadblocks specifically preventing women from achieving the highest positions of power and meritocracy"
Yes, and the fact that the current president is black is proof that there's no racial discrimination roadblocks in the US. Hey, do you want to buy a bridge? I have one I'm trying to sell, runs from NYC to Brooklyn, you'll make a killing on the tolls.
I suspect that sadly it will ultimately take legislation to regulate media (in particular the advertising industry) to solve the problem, by mandating that gender-specific marketing of a product toward children is illegal, period. (And yes, I mean the toy dump trucks and dolls as much as the technical toys.)
It sounds heavy-handed, but there doesn't seem to be much else that will fix it. Certainly not "niche" small-scale products that are essentially mice attempting to balance against the toy company "elephant". The elephant likes the status quo and will only change if you hit it with a cattle-prod.
Give me a break. That is a violation of the first amendment.
I don't "get" why anyone cares about the "gender gap". Who cares? If there is overt sexism, obviously that is wrong, but there is no law (nor should their be) that every field of employment should be an even 50/50 gender split. Men and women are different, and differences should be embraced. We shouldn't be legislating society to fit a utopian ideal of exact gender equality. Biologically human genders aren't equal.
1. Two isolated markets are less competitive than a single consolidated market -- possibly enabling higher prices.
2. It's a sort of planned obsolescence, due to the fifty-fifty chance of having to go out and buy a whole new set of toys when the second kid is born.
I remember sitting with my class of 120 on the first day with my Mechanical Engineering class. One of the profs asked us how many of us played with Lego growing up. I believe that every single hand in the room was raised to that question (about 20% of those were women).
My suspicion would be that Lego is pretty much universal and that very few children grow up not playing with it at least occasionally.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_EV3
Lego Mindstorms would be in the same price category today, I would say. I suspect most parents would have to be sure the kid will play with it to excuse the price, it is not something you buy just to try whether the kid like it or not.
[Warning: the Surgeon General indicates that anecdotal evidence may be detrimental to your mental health] Of a few little girls I know, this has worked well.
Even younger kids do not have to be very closely supervised when working with real tools if you remove dangerous ones. Three years old can safely play with few screwdrivers, pliers and cardboard box without close supervision.
Don't worry about outcomes or what people should be playing with. Actually "should be playing with" is almost a contradiction in terms since play is undirected.
There aren't many campaigns to get more men into Nursing, AFAIK, although it is a very important profession with an extremely heavy gender skew.
I understand that men have the advantage in general, but in specific fields, this isn't the case. My (male) cousin is in nursing school right now; >80% of the class is female, and he regularly gets teased about being a male nurse.
Heck, the movie "Meet the Fokkers" had that as one of the central jokes: Ben Stiller is a male nurse! Haha, isn't that funny?