[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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