South in the Winter

(Source: lionhearted-blonde)

scienceing:

mybluedecember:

princess-munchkin:

How the fuck does Bill Nye expect this to happen? What do you want to do, force women to enroll in science courses, regardless of whether or not they want to do it? Just for the sake of having “enough” women? Why the fuck do these fractions matter so much? It’s not like people are holding guns to our head and threatening to kill us if we become interested in science.

Maybe, just maybe, a lot of us DON’T FUCKING WANT to be scientists. Is that a crime?

Hi there, princess-munchkin. Female engineering student here. 

Bill Nye is not saying that you HAVE to be a scientist, and you are right that no one is holding a gun to my head because I am interested in science, but let me tell you some of the struggles of being a woman in the STEM fields. 

1) Because I am a woman, I am not expected these fields. I first fully realized this when I was in high school, on my robotics team. See, although my robotics team was about 50% female, most of the women were part of the “business administration” side of things: finance, marketting, PR, membership, etc. Was this a problem? Absolutely not. But I was there to be an engineer, and specifically, to be the robot programmer. This was met with a lot of hesitation at first from some of the other students (all of whom happened to be male. This is not necessarily a bad thing.) You see, all of the robot programmers before me were guys. Computer programming is just a thing that guys do, or so they thought. Even after I had proved myself to the mentors on the team, many of the students still underestimated my abilities. There were rumors going around that I wouldn’t have been able to program the robot at all if the lead software mentor wasn’t there to help me. This was just flat-out false, but it wasn’t until I won an award for the team that the other students actually saw my merit. 

2) There is not a lot of encouragement for women to go into these fields. I first noticed this when I was in elementary school. I was always interested in math, science, you name it, but many of my teachers and family members pushed that to the side for a long time. When I asked for legos for christmas, I would get ballet slippers. In fact, for a long time, I was training to be a professional dancer. I loved to dance. I loved math more, but no one seemed to notice that about me. It wasn’t until I had a long conversation with one particular teacher in high school that I decided to look into engineering. I had never even considered it as an option before, because no one decided to encourage me to pursue my interest in science. If it hadn’t been for that teacher, I would probably not be at the school I am at right now. 

3) For a long time, Engineering/Science/Math WAS a “boys only” club. Let me tell you when some of the top technical schools and societies started letting women in:

• RPI, The oldest tech school in the country, founded in 1824. Started admitting women in 1942 to “replace men called to war.” Campus housing for women wasn’t constructed until 1966. 
• Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honors Society - Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1968.
• Caltech - Currently rated #3 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1891. Started admitting women in 1970. 
• Georgia Tech - Currently rated #5 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1952. 

Do you see the implications of this? Engineering has been a part of our society since around the late 1800s (in the case of RPI, since the 1820s), but women weren’t even allowed in for the most part until the 1950s, regardless of their merit. 

4) Because of the fact that it was a “boys only” club for such a long time, there are not a lot of women engineers and scientists to look up to. When you’re reading your physics, chemistry, and math text books, the majority of those theories were came up with by men. It is true that much of our history was written by White Men, but this does not mean that the fact that there are few women scientists to look up does not matter. 

So, as you can hopefully see, princess-munckin, or anyone else that shares the opinions of princess-munchkin, Bill Nye was not arguing that women that are not interested in STEM should go into those fields anyway. But he IS arguing against all of the systematic barriers set up against women who ARE interested in engineering and science. There are several women out there who are just as good as the boys at math and science, but will never pursue their interests because it just doesn’t seem like an option. That was me for a long time. I am super grateful for the fact that I fought against that, and that I ended up where I am. 

if you don’t like science, fine. Don’t be a scientist. But if one day you have a daughter and she shows interest in being a scientist, PLEASE encourage her. Because Bill Nye is right, there needs to be more women scientists in the world. 

A+ comment

While mybluedecember made some excellent points about the difficulties facing girls already interested in STEM, I think Bill Nye’s point was a statistical one. If ~50% of the world’s population is female, then in an unbiased sample, ~50% of participants will be female. So STEM fields are biased towards men, obviously. But why are girls less likely to be interested in math & science? Is it just “how girls’ brains work” in opposition to dudebrains? Bullshit. What needs to be examined here is why a lot of girls “just don’t fucking want to be scientists,” and I think at least partly that has to do with the way we’re socialized to interpret failure.

Girls are encouraged to focus on their strengths, while boys are encouraged to work harder at their weaknesses. If a girl is having a hard time with math (almost everyone does, because math is harder than any one of the humanities you learn in gradeschool, it just is, it’s a completely different language, and for us mere mortals it takes practice to get), she is usually told that she’s just “not good at math.” So she gives it up as a lost cause, focuses on her reading and writing and history, and rarely will she ever discover the beauty and sense of numbers. Boys facing failure are more likely to be told to work harder, which is just the most basic requirement of understanding math and science. It takes work, ya’ll. Lots and lots of work. (sobs into textbooks)

Here’s an article that touches a bit on this, and discusses more implications about the self-esteem of women later in life. If there are any girls like me out there, you probably thought in high school (or earlier), “But math is so much harder for me than language, I’ll never understand it!” —guess what, math is harder for almost everyone. MATH IS JUST HARDER. But that’s what makes it fun! And when you really really try (it took falling in love with chemistry for me to even give math half a chance), you can learn to embrace the challenge.

And then, when you try to get a job, you get to face all the institutional discrimination described above by mybluedecember. But as more and more women are entering into STEM fields, I really do think that will improve. It’ll improve even faster if girls learn at a younger age not to give up; to, in NDT’s words, “at least give yourself the opportunity that any person learning a foreign language would give themselves, before turning around and saying you’re not good at math.” I wish somebody had told me this earlier in my studies, because when I discovered “Hey science is actually really cool,” I was woefully behind in quantitative reasoning. It’s a skill, it’s not a gift. I hadn’t been encouraged to develop it. And that failure was discouraging as hell, and so many times I wanted to throw in the towel because hadn’t you heard? I’m just not that good at math. NO MAUREEN, YOU JUST HAVEN’T TRIED HARD AND LONG ENOUGH. Fight that gradeschool brainwashing. Knowledge of a subject is NOT somehow intrinsic, that’s ridiculous.

But it’s never too late! I was telling everyone “I’m just not good at math” right up until senior year of high school. And now I’ve taken calculus up to the third level and it’s still harder than anything else I’ve done, but so so worth it.

(Source: estateestate)

joeydeangelis:

It’s A Disaster
dir. Todd Berger, 2012

“You know I never went to Europe? Never. Not once. I never even went to Montreal, which I hear is very European. I never went scuba diving.  I never went to the ballet. I’ve never been in love. I’ve never even watched The Wire.”
“All of those things are overrated…Except for The Wire. It’s really good.”

seananigans:

George R.R. Martin, standing in front of his artificial lake filled with the tears of book readers.