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Well, and you've got to remember that people are social animals. Is there less interest because a woman or a person of color looks at the field and sees that n
by Frondo 12y ago
Well, and you've got to remember that people are social animals.
Is there less interest because a woman or a person of color looks at the field and sees that no one else there looks like them?
Or, more to the point, the people in the field all look like the one group that has historically dominated everyone else?
Maybe that's discouraging. I'm guessing it is. I don't have the lived-in experience of it because I'm a white male, but I do like to keep my "I'm right and I know everything" attitudes in check when I talk to women and people of color, and ask them about their experiences. One minute of listening to people is worth a million speculative web forum comments.
- beat 12y agoThat's part of it, sort of. I think a lot of it boils down to kids building their expectations based on the adults they know. It's certainly my own observation from childhood. Growing up poor, I rarely interacted with adults who were educated, successful, and wealthy (except the men my father worked for, whom he despised). I don't think I knew a single engineer when I was a child. This is a huge problem for the black/latino communities, who don't have adult role models in these professions. This is a near-daily discussion topic for me. One of my best friends is a very successful doctor and financial expert who happens to be black. He has something of a personal mission to teach financial literacy to black teenagers, because they see so little of it growing up (and I grew up without it, too). He firmly believes that software and engineering are the best path to middle class success for smart kids of color, but he's always struggling on ways to encourage it.