8 ms·

The Only Way To Get Girls into STEM (Boys Too)

46 points by peterb 12y ago

Spooky23 12y ago
You need to make it part of play. Make it fun. Computers were fun to me because I played games and was motivated to maximize the meager capabilities of my IBM XT, and wanted to cheat in games. So I learned all sorts of things there. In computer class, there was no exploration, no fun. Oregon Trail was cool, but didn't capture the imagination. I hated Math in school for many years, but my grandfather tutored me. Then I discovered puzzles and how to apply math to problems that had some relevance to me.
- dublinben 12y ago
  This is just as important on the hardware side. As far back as I can remember, I had fun tearing apart electronics and computers. My junior high school had a computer club where we created Frankenstein machines out of discarded computers, and did whatever we had to to make them work. You simply cannot have the same experience with a sealed, black box, computing device like an iPad, Surface, or Chromebook. I hesitate to even call them "computers" since they're so unlike the computers I built as a child.
- ilovecomputers 12y ago
  This is exactly why Google' "Made with Code" campaign is so good: https://www.madewithcode.com/ https://www.madewithcode.com/ Look at the message, it is about how computers are fun and empowering. Even with this general message, they still market to girls by simply showing how women and girls are involved with coding. The target of the campaign is girls, but the message is universal that girls don't feel like outsiders and even boys can tag along.
eroo 12y ago
There are two problems that too often seem to be conflated as a single issue: (1) we need more STEM students/workers, because they will build the future, and (2) there is persistent discrimination (notably sexism) in some of the sub-specialties that can't be tolerated. Is there a reason to suspect that tackling both of these at the same time (e.g., demographic specific initiatives) yields significant benefit over alternatives?
- resu_nimda 12y ago
  Yes, and I think the author is mistaken to make that conflation. To me it represents a willful blindness to your second issue. Yes, it would be great if our society was more gender-neutral, but it's not, and it never has been (in a historically relative sense, we've come quite a long way). I don't think we can just say "hey let's market toys to boys and girls equally and everything will just work itself out." Again, it's like sticking your fingers in your ears because you don't want to face the murkier, less tractable issues of human nature. The issue is real and it goes a lot deeper than gender norms promulgated by contemporary society.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  Is there a reason to suspect that tackling both of these at the same time (e.g., demographic specific initiatives) yields significant benefit over alternatives? If you treat a field as gendered in your recruiting of kids, the sum of your efforts may ultimately balance the scales more than they're self-defeating. But don't think for a moment kids are stupid enough to hear a gender-specific, or gender-targeted introduction/recruitment to some field and not walk away with some notion that a field is "for" a specific gender, or that one is "better" at it than another.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
collyw 12y ago
I really don't see the need to get more women in tech. Its obvious from school age that it just doesn't interest them as much. You never hear of the need to get more male nurses, or primary teachers and that is generally not viewed as a problem. Edit: I stand corrected, apparently there are big movements to get males into the professions I mentioned. Just that I never heard about these movements.
- dublinben 12y ago
  >You never hear of the need to get more male nurses, or primary teachers and that is generally not viewed as a problem. This actually is a common conversation within those fields, and is certainly viewed as a problem in wider society. Some researchers claim that one reason male students underperform in school is due to the lack of adult male role models in the form of teachers. As a male with some experience in education, I have seen first hand how much my very presence in the classroom can inspire young male students. They yearn for more male teachers, and they don't even know anything about education theory or developmental psychology.
  - collyw 12y ago
    They doesn't seem to receive as much attention as IT and women type conversions. In fact I have never heard a "we need more men in" for any job role.
- minikites 12y ago
  You are 100% wrong on the second point, there is plenty of effort to get men into traditionally female jobs like nursing and teaching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#Increasing_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#Increasing_numbe...
  - return0 12y ago
    Still, it's not nearly as much as the reverse campaign. I have never received any messaging through media etc. about such a campaign. It exists, in theory.
detcader 12y ago
Our society markets cultural gender references to the extent that we instill into girls a dislike of “traditionally male” interests from early on. So could one say that we do need to focus on girls, to the extent that we recognize the socialization they receive in a society where gender roles are a thing? I agree with the article in general -- though I don't see anything wrong with programs for girls who have already found themselves teenaged and without the resources to get the necessary programming/STEM experience, and/or being uncomfortable around teenage boys in a field that the boys have been taught is their turf. The media should promote some more female STEM role models. It would make up for the years of degredation and exclusion of women in STEM on TV, in the movies, etc -- especially in kid's media, where girls and women are usually token side-characters when they aren't princesses (see reelgirl.com for thorough documentation). It'll never happen, of course, despite that it would hurt no one, because the necessary critical thinking, along with the knowledge of women's history, to keep ourselves from shouting "gender bias!!!" at anything helping women succeed, is absent.
- jmromer 12y ago
  I wonder if anyone has done a longitudinal study of children raised in environments where they were strongly incentivized (to put it mildly) to favor activities that we typically see taken up by members of the opposite sex. No IRB would approve this nowadays, but maybe someone started one back in the day? Even without such a study it should be intuitive that steering neurotypical (in the broad sense) boys toward typically female preferences and activities, and vice versa, will end up being cruel along some margin. (Just as it's certainly cruel for an atypical girl to be forced into typically female behaviors and preferences, which is what you're describing.) The question is, where's the margin?
  - detcader 12y ago
    NYU sociologist Emily Kane's book The Gender Trap documents the closest we'll probably get to a study that explores that notion, in this century. I highly recommend it http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=11234 http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=11234 The synopses of the book that are on the internet don't inform of the degree to which it's an actual study by a sociologist; it's not a pop-parenting book.
Pxtl 12y ago
I don't think Lego can be blamed for Lego Friends. They made gender-neutral lego toys for years and years, and never made the kind of spectacular traction they got with girls through Lego Friends.
- detcader 12y ago
  A LEGO block is sex-neutral, but the decades of marketing and LEGO character pieces certainly were not. LEGO can't take all the blame, given that many parents probably didn't buy LEGOs for their daughters given their own internalized stereotypes, but it could have recognized that this was a phenomenon and aggressively worked to include girls in their "neutral" toys. As usual, the actual problem is deeper than symtomatic entities like LEGO. We will see the end of this issue when we see the end of the world's obsession with sex and sex stereotypes.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
doctorfoo 12y ago
It really all starts with Lego IMO. Give all children male/female a box of Lego on their first birthday. Either they'll take to it or they won't. Problem solved!
- rockdoe 12y ago
  Looks like one of my kids wants to go into management, and the other into demolitions.
- doctorfoo 12y ago
  ...maybe I should also add: A doll and a hair ribbon or something, too. Hey, while not dolls, I had great fun with my teddy bears as a kid. Served up some mean teddy bear picnics. With the participation of my sister, made some teddy bear magazines for them to read. My mother baked them some miniature cakes. Of course, the bears went parachuting and such too.
- angersock 12y ago
  You're going to have a lot of kids choking on legos...
  - doctorfoo 12y ago
    An important life lesson, surely? Actually, I remember now, before Lego I had some large wooden bricks. Building towers and bridges was pretty neat. Playing physics based puzzle games is still great fun!
  - rockdoe 12y ago
    Lego has "DUPLO" which is their baby-safe version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Duplo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Duplo
paxtonab 12y ago
I think focusing on children is the right way to tackle this issue. Per the author's point she works in an environment with an equal mix of male/female. Teaching kids from an early age that their gender doesn't limit the career they pursue will make this more the norm than not.
- numo16 12y ago
  > Teaching kids from an early age that their gender doesn't limit the career they pursue will make this more the norm than not. I believe this is one of the main issues. We tell kids they can "be whatever you want to be", and then look at a girl funny when she wants to be an engineer or make fun of a boy for wanting to be a nurse. Society has ingrained certain ideas into what a person in a given career looks like that people are deterred (consciously or subconsciously) from that career if they don't fit the norm. For example, what is the first image that pop's into your head when you think of a nurse? This seems to be one of the fields that has been pushed so hard into a female career in our societal consciousness, that an entire genre of porn exists around this single occupation (I want my male naughty nurse Halloween costume, damn it!). It's at a point where societal norms would need to be broken down from the ground up, with regards to gender roles and careers, starting with kids.
quizzas 12y ago
If you reduce STEM to its most fundamental trait in a child, it would be something like "the love of taking things apart and/or assembling things together." Obviously Lego is one activity that appeals to this trait however their are other less obvious ones such as taking apart Barbie clothes and reassembling them - sometimes exchanging various limbs and heads. Also deconstructing food dishes to their component ingredients before reassembling a better recipe in the Easy Bake oven. Are these not STEM traits that are somewhat gender biased but still cultivates the necessary curiosity to excel in STEM later in life? Needless to say my daughter is this child and yet shares nothing of her brother's passion for Legos, Mindstorm robotics, programming games, etc. Yet as a parent I'm not concerned because as long as this desire to deconstruct/reconstruct is present, STEM is always an option.
return0 12y ago
I don't think that's it. The differences in percentages between men and women in STEM are just too big to attribute them to "early conditioning" anymore, esp. after so many years of campaining [1]. Either men are masochists and choose jobs that are "not fun", or men find STEM more fun than women. I believe, at least in Europe, there is no lack of exposure to STEM subjects. The idea of interwoving them sounds a little bit silly: a sci-fi text will bore a student who is literature-oriented in the same way that a mathematical model of romance will sound cheesy to a math nerd. 1. http://techpageone.dell.com/business/study-women-stem-careers/#.U6m4Nfna58E http://techpageone.dell.com/business/study-women-stem-career...
- option_greek 12y ago
  I wonder what the scenario is in Nordic countries which (supposedly) have much more female friendly society.
  - tsax 12y ago
    It's called the gender equality paradox. The more supposedly 'equal' the opportunities between genders are, the more the outcomes seem to diverge. Scandinavian countries have strong gender-based career divergence as well.
- j2kun 12y ago
  Make no mistake, there are plenty of literature-oriented sci-fi novels. Frankenstein was one of them that's taught regularly in schools, but there are plenty of modern examples as well. And I remember very recently a handful of stories on HN describing mathematical dating models. The problem is that the literature teachers aren't trained enough to discuss the STEM parts in any real depth; they're trained to think that readers are just supposed to accept the sci-fi assumptions in order to generate an interesting narrative conflict. And while that's partly true, it also results in throwing out a lot of really interesting discussion.
- SolarNet 12y ago
  Years of campaigning means nothing if society hasn't notably changed as a result. It really is our entertainment, half of all television shows for children show men (boys) being innately superior in intelligence [1]. Even worse, there are no children's shows with primary female genius characters (they are all male), and when they do show up as non-primary characters their intelligence is often overshadowed by their feminine attributes. It's even worse in teen TV, where the smart female characters are more often portrayed as being love interests for male characters over being smart. And lets not even get into the rampant sexism in most mainstream video games (and their communities), even more important for software engineering and computer science since modding/making/playing video games seems to be a common factor for many male entrants, and relatively uncommon among female entrants to the field (at least in my recent but anecdotal experience). This all leads to a situation where computers, engineering, science, and math are more often seen as male disciplines. We may have cleaned up a lot of blatant sexism, especially in modern workplaces, but our media is still teaching our children gender bias, often with a detrimental effect for both genders (for example decreasing college rates for males, how many male teen characters care about getting into college, have their shit together, etc). [1] http://www.truechild.org/PageDisplay.asp?p1=6656 http://www.truechild.org/PageDisplay.asp?p1=6656
pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
you're all idiots. mandating sexism is not a solution to sexism. the "ONLY" way??? "Boys too"??? well, i'm a "boy", and i got into STEM without this "way". how about you start supporting STEM by not stipulating a logical statement that is easily provably false. logic is the core of STEM, and you're shitting on it. did a woman write the article?
bsdetector 12y ago
I have a controversial view of this. That is, why are so many men forced or pressured to go into a STEM career? This is the exact same question, just framed from the perspective that there are plenty of other jobs that pay well enough and are easier. Computer science for instance is sitting behind a desk all day every day more or less constantly using your brain and concentrating. This is kind of a bad choice of occupation even though it appeals to some and has some upsides. We know from the "pay gap" that women's lower pay is balanced by fewer hours, shorter commute, better environment, and other benefits of that kind; there's essentially no actual discrimination for the same work. This makes me wonder whether women are choosing this result, or whether men are steered away from working easier, less well-paying jobs. It could be that women aren't going into STEM in equal numbers simply because they have subjectively better choices available. If that's the case, then programs to equalize the numbers will doubly discriminate against men by being forced into it in the first place and then getting less compensation in the second.

46 points by peterb 12y ago

You need to make it part of play. Make it fun. Computers were fun to me because I played games and was motivated to maximize the meager capabilities of my IBM XT, and wanted to cheat in games. So I learned all sorts of things there. In computer class, there was no exploration, no fun. Oregon Trail was cool, but didn't capture the imagination. I hated Math in school for many years, but my grandfather tutored me. Then I discovered puzzles and how to apply math to problems that had some relevance to me.

dublinben 12y ago
This is just as important on the hardware side. As far back as I can remember, I had fun tearing apart electronics and computers. My junior high school had a computer club where we created Frankenstein machines out of discarded computers, and did whatever we had to to make them work. You simply cannot have the same experience with a sealed, black box, computing device like an iPad, Surface, or Chromebook. I hesitate to even call them "computers" since they're so unlike the computers I built as a child.
ilovecomputers 12y ago
This is exactly why Google' "Made with Code" campaign is so good: https://www.madewithcode.com/ https://www.madewithcode.com/ Look at the message, it is about how computers are fun and empowering. Even with this general message, they still market to girls by simply showing how women and girls are involved with coding. The target of the campaign is girls, but the message is universal that girls don't feel like outsiders and even boys can tag along.

eroo 12y ago

There are two problems that too often seem to be conflated as a single issue: (1) we need more STEM students/workers, because they will build the future, and (2) there is persistent discrimination (notably sexism) in some of the sub-specialties that can't be tolerated. Is there a reason to suspect that tackling both of these at the same time (e.g., demographic specific initiatives) yields significant benefit over alternatives?

resu_nimda 12y ago
Yes, and I think the author is mistaken to make that conflation. To me it represents a willful blindness to your second issue. Yes, it would be great if our society was more gender-neutral, but it's not, and it never has been (in a historically relative sense, we've come quite a long way). I don't think we can just say "hey let's market toys to boys and girls equally and everything will just work itself out." Again, it's like sticking your fingers in your ears because you don't want to face the murkier, less tractable issues of human nature. The issue is real and it goes a lot deeper than gender norms promulgated by contemporary society.
forgottenpass 12y ago
Is there a reason to suspect that tackling both of these at the same time (e.g., demographic specific initiatives) yields significant benefit over alternatives? If you treat a field as gendered in your recruiting of kids, the sum of your efforts may ultimately balance the scales more than they're self-defeating. But don't think for a moment kids are stupid enough to hear a gender-specific, or gender-targeted introduction/recruitment to some field and not walk away with some notion that a field is "for" a specific gender, or that one is "better" at it than another.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

collyw 12y ago

I really don't see the need to get more women in tech. Its obvious from school age that it just doesn't interest them as much. You never hear of the need to get more male nurses, or primary teachers and that is generally not viewed as a problem. Edit: I stand corrected, apparently there are big movements to get males into the professions I mentioned. Just that I never heard about these movements.

dublinben 12y ago
>You never hear of the need to get more male nurses, or primary teachers and that is generally not viewed as a problem. This actually is a common conversation within those fields, and is certainly viewed as a problem in wider society. Some researchers claim that one reason male students underperform in school is due to the lack of adult male role models in the form of teachers. As a male with some experience in education, I have seen first hand how much my very presence in the classroom can inspire young male students. They yearn for more male teachers, and they don't even know anything about education theory or developmental psychology.
- collyw 12y ago
  They doesn't seem to receive as much attention as IT and women type conversions. In fact I have never heard a "we need more men in" for any job role.
minikites 12y ago
You are 100% wrong on the second point, there is plenty of effort to get men into traditionally female jobs like nursing and teaching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#Increasing_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#Increasing_numbe...
- return0 12y ago
  Still, it's not nearly as much as the reverse campaign. I have never received any messaging through media etc. about such a campaign. It exists, in theory.

detcader 12y ago

Our society markets cultural gender references to the extent that we instill into girls a dislike of “traditionally male” interests from early on. So could one say that we do need to focus on girls, to the extent that we recognize the socialization they receive in a society where gender roles are a thing? I agree with the article in general -- though I don't see anything wrong with programs for girls who have already found themselves teenaged and without the resources to get the necessary programming/STEM experience, and/or being uncomfortable around teenage boys in a field that the boys have been taught is their turf. The media should promote some more female STEM role models. It would make up for the years of degredation and exclusion of women in STEM on TV, in the movies, etc -- especially in kid's media, where girls and women are usually token side-characters when they aren't princesses (see reelgirl.com for thorough documentation). It'll never happen, of course, despite that it would hurt no one, because the necessary critical thinking, along with the knowledge of women's history, to keep ourselves from shouting "gender bias!!!" at anything helping women succeed, is absent.

jmromer 12y ago
I wonder if anyone has done a longitudinal study of children raised in environments where they were strongly incentivized (to put it mildly) to favor activities that we typically see taken up by members of the opposite sex. No IRB would approve this nowadays, but maybe someone started one back in the day? Even without such a study it should be intuitive that steering neurotypical (in the broad sense) boys toward typically female preferences and activities, and vice versa, will end up being cruel along some margin. (Just as it's certainly cruel for an atypical girl to be forced into typically female behaviors and preferences, which is what you're describing.) The question is, where's the margin?
- detcader 12y ago
  NYU sociologist Emily Kane's book The Gender Trap documents the closest we'll probably get to a study that explores that notion, in this century. I highly recommend it http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=11234 http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=11234 The synopses of the book that are on the internet don't inform of the degree to which it's an actual study by a sociologist; it's not a pop-parenting book.

Pxtl 12y ago

I don't think Lego can be blamed for Lego Friends. They made gender-neutral lego toys for years and years, and never made the kind of spectacular traction they got with girls through Lego Friends.

detcader 12y ago
A LEGO block is sex-neutral, but the decades of marketing and LEGO character pieces certainly were not. LEGO can't take all the blame, given that many parents probably didn't buy LEGOs for their daughters given their own internalized stereotypes, but it could have recognized that this was a phenomenon and aggressively worked to include girls in their "neutral" toys. As usual, the actual problem is deeper than symtomatic entities like LEGO. We will see the end of this issue when we see the end of the world's obsession with sex and sex stereotypes.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

doctorfoo 12y ago

It really all starts with Lego IMO. Give all children male/female a box of Lego on their first birthday. Either they'll take to it or they won't. Problem solved!

rockdoe 12y ago
Looks like one of my kids wants to go into management, and the other into demolitions.
doctorfoo 12y ago
...maybe I should also add: A doll and a hair ribbon or something, too. Hey, while not dolls, I had great fun with my teddy bears as a kid. Served up some mean teddy bear picnics. With the participation of my sister, made some teddy bear magazines for them to read. My mother baked them some miniature cakes. Of course, the bears went parachuting and such too.
angersock 12y ago
You're going to have a lot of kids choking on legos...
- doctorfoo 12y ago
  An important life lesson, surely? Actually, I remember now, before Lego I had some large wooden bricks. Building towers and bridges was pretty neat. Playing physics based puzzle games is still great fun!
- rockdoe 12y ago
  Lego has "DUPLO" which is their baby-safe version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Duplo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Duplo

paxtonab 12y ago

I think focusing on children is the right way to tackle this issue. Per the author's point she works in an environment with an equal mix of male/female. Teaching kids from an early age that their gender doesn't limit the career they pursue will make this more the norm than not.

numo16 12y ago
> Teaching kids from an early age that their gender doesn't limit the career they pursue will make this more the norm than not. I believe this is one of the main issues. We tell kids they can "be whatever you want to be", and then look at a girl funny when she wants to be an engineer or make fun of a boy for wanting to be a nurse. Society has ingrained certain ideas into what a person in a given career looks like that people are deterred (consciously or subconsciously) from that career if they don't fit the norm. For example, what is the first image that pop's into your head when you think of a nurse? This seems to be one of the fields that has been pushed so hard into a female career in our societal consciousness, that an entire genre of porn exists around this single occupation (I want my male naughty nurse Halloween costume, damn it!). It's at a point where societal norms would need to be broken down from the ground up, with regards to gender roles and careers, starting with kids.

quizzas 12y ago

If you reduce STEM to its most fundamental trait in a child, it would be something like "the love of taking things apart and/or assembling things together." Obviously Lego is one activity that appeals to this trait however their are other less obvious ones such as taking apart Barbie clothes and reassembling them - sometimes exchanging various limbs and heads. Also deconstructing food dishes to their component ingredients before reassembling a better recipe in the Easy Bake oven. Are these not STEM traits that are somewhat gender biased but still cultivates the necessary curiosity to excel in STEM later in life? Needless to say my daughter is this child and yet shares nothing of her brother's passion for Legos, Mindstorm robotics, programming games, etc. Yet as a parent I'm not concerned because as long as this desire to deconstruct/reconstruct is present, STEM is always an option.

return0 12y ago

I don't think that's it. The differences in percentages between men and women in STEM are just too big to attribute them to "early conditioning" anymore, esp. after so many years of campaining [1]. Either men are masochists and choose jobs that are "not fun", or men find STEM more fun than women. I believe, at least in Europe, there is no lack of exposure to STEM subjects. The idea of interwoving them sounds a little bit silly: a sci-fi text will bore a student who is literature-oriented in the same way that a mathematical model of romance will sound cheesy to a math nerd. 1. http://techpageone.dell.com/business/study-women-stem-careers/#.U6m4Nfna58E http://techpageone.dell.com/business/study-women-stem-career...

option_greek 12y ago
I wonder what the scenario is in Nordic countries which (supposedly) have much more female friendly society.
- tsax 12y ago
  It's called the gender equality paradox. The more supposedly 'equal' the opportunities between genders are, the more the outcomes seem to diverge. Scandinavian countries have strong gender-based career divergence as well.
j2kun 12y ago
Make no mistake, there are plenty of literature-oriented sci-fi novels. Frankenstein was one of them that's taught regularly in schools, but there are plenty of modern examples as well. And I remember very recently a handful of stories on HN describing mathematical dating models. The problem is that the literature teachers aren't trained enough to discuss the STEM parts in any real depth; they're trained to think that readers are just supposed to accept the sci-fi assumptions in order to generate an interesting narrative conflict. And while that's partly true, it also results in throwing out a lot of really interesting discussion.
SolarNet 12y ago
Years of campaigning means nothing if society hasn't notably changed as a result. It really is our entertainment, half of all television shows for children show men (boys) being innately superior in intelligence [1]. Even worse, there are no children's shows with primary female genius characters (they are all male), and when they do show up as non-primary characters their intelligence is often overshadowed by their feminine attributes. It's even worse in teen TV, where the smart female characters are more often portrayed as being love interests for male characters over being smart. And lets not even get into the rampant sexism in most mainstream video games (and their communities), even more important for software engineering and computer science since modding/making/playing video games seems to be a common factor for many male entrants, and relatively uncommon among female entrants to the field (at least in my recent but anecdotal experience). This all leads to a situation where computers, engineering, science, and math are more often seen as male disciplines. We may have cleaned up a lot of blatant sexism, especially in modern workplaces, but our media is still teaching our children gender bias, often with a detrimental effect for both genders (for example decreasing college rates for males, how many male teen characters care about getting into college, have their shit together, etc). [1] http://www.truechild.org/PageDisplay.asp?p1=6656 http://www.truechild.org/PageDisplay.asp?p1=6656

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago

you're all idiots. mandating sexism is not a solution to sexism. the "ONLY" way??? "Boys too"??? well, i'm a "boy", and i got into STEM without this "way". how about you start supporting STEM by not stipulating a logical statement that is easily provably false. logic is the core of STEM, and you're shitting on it. did a woman write the article?

bsdetector 12y ago

I have a controversial view of this. That is, why are so many men forced or pressured to go into a STEM career? This is the exact same question, just framed from the perspective that there are plenty of other jobs that pay well enough and are easier. Computer science for instance is sitting behind a desk all day every day more or less constantly using your brain and concentrating. This is kind of a bad choice of occupation even though it appeals to some and has some upsides. We know from the "pay gap" that women's lower pay is balanced by fewer hours, shorter commute, better environment, and other benefits of that kind; there's essentially no actual discrimination for the same work. This makes me wonder whether women are choosing this result, or whether men are steered away from working easier, less well-paying jobs. It could be that women aren't going into STEM in equal numbers simply because they have subjectively better choices available. If that's the case, then programs to equalize the numbers will doubly discriminate against men by being forced into it in the first place and then getting less compensation in the second.