[TriLUG] The biggest deterrent for women in tech
Peter Neilson
neilson at windstream.net
Tue Apr 30 16:29:03 EDT 2013
Again I'm probably a few days late and several dollars short on this
discussion. My dear wife (who is a woman in spite of her childhood
ambition at the age of five to grow up to be a boy) says that when she
went for Chem Engineering at (well-known tech-and-boiler school that
sounds like a famous brand of chicken) she discovered after two years of
study that she had been "channeled" into the freshman curriculum for
majoring in Chemistry, not Chem Eng. The engineering path was reserved for
men! Granted, this was some time ago.
I notice, in counseling youngsters on career paths, that a great many
girls "hate" mathematics. You cannot go anywhere in a tech career without
mathematics, and allowing yourself to hate it rather than get it right is
a tremendous blunder. Wishing that you understood Maxwell's equations does
not get you an EE degree. Or at least it shouldn't. So girls allow
themselves to be channeled into biology, where they mistakenly think they
won't need mathematics, and where they hope for careers that do not exist.
Mathematics itself does not discriminate based on sex. Or rather, if it
does (and the historical evidence suggests such) the mechanism is entirely
a mystery to me. I am at a loss to explain why several girls in my
high-school class were better at mathematics than I was, but today not one
of them works in a technical, scientific or mathematical field. One (my
accountant) did, but she has passed away.
My own niece majored in forestry, thinking she would like to work out in a
forest, somewhere, and would not need difficult stuff like science and
math. She then switched to art. Never graduated at all.
The education field is populated by people, especially women, who failed
at mathematics. They counsel, possibly without explicit intention, that
"math is too hard for girls." It's self-perpetuating, because of the
expectation of failure.
On the other hand, I have seen men and women who had obtained PhD degrees
in various fields become excellent tech writers.
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