You won't get an argument from me that even women sometimes (perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not) discourage their daughters from exploring budding interests in math or science.
"Ugh, you don't want to be handling angleworms dear..." and don't get me started on those quilting books that emphasize
"No worries over block resizing, everything is pre-calculated and cutting charts are provided for all us math haters!"
FFS if they would even just at least say "arithmetic haters". And it's alarming that their great grandmothers sure god did the simple arithmetic and didn't waste paper making charts of block sizes they'd no intention of using. They had scissors, string, pencils, cardboard and glasses or teacups if circles were needed. We have acrylic templates in every shape and size one could imagine plus a few invented just because it's easier to trace one of them than sew two different shapes together to get that outcome. And we look down our our great grandmas for doing all that stuff the hard way. Shrug. I guess guys laugh at their great grandpas for assorted stuff too, save for maybe fans of very old cars and black powder guns.
So we're not that different, us boyz n girlz. We all progress together and we all have different ideas on what that means.
On the other hand, the study you cited has valid points for at least further study. I have never thought we should be trying to funnel anyone into a vocation or career in which he or she is not interested and enters anyway as response to pressure along lines of "you can make a lot of money doing this" or "you can always make a living doing this" -- or even "there aren't many women doing this so you'll stick out if they're trying to look diversified".
There are as many agendas around the kitchen table of an American home as there are in Washington DC.
I believe that encouragement and permission to explore interests are key to individual success of men and women... and advancement of a nation's interests as well. It goes not just for women entering STEM careers in Afghanistan or Iran but just as well for men and women being pressured in the USA to "be a lawyer... doctor... investment banker."
There's food for thought there when one regards the Trump administration's current push to return American presence to the moon, when we have spent at least three decades now watching our universities crank out engineers quite capable of realizing one can more profitably take rocket science straight into Wall Street and write algorithms to hedge market bets or convert analyzable debt into packages of derivative assets that are practically unfathomable. I cannot be the only person knows people with PhDs in STEM who have spent long stretches being taxi drivers or per diem teaching assistants in remedial math or basic sciences at state universities. We have a short term profit focus that puts quite a crimp on expansion of research and development.
If a little girl would rather sketch horses in a pasture than spend time wondering why it is that a rabbit hops but a weasel runs... why should she be pressured to major in biology or become a nurse or a lab technician? Maybe her artistic inclinations deserve more space and encouragement.
You can't make a buck doing that. You can't even pay off the college loans it takes to get the right to stick "Master of Fine Arts" on your CV. It's the kind of thing you do if you're just going to college to find a husband.
To that I say: tell that to Alyssa Monks...
We need to keep trying to minimize systemic overhang of the old views of "a woman's place" in our world. And so I like seeing more programs that encourage girls and women to explore options that used to be reserved to "a man's world." The existence of more such programs doesn't reduce the number of programs that are set up for boys or men. Programs, clubs (and magazines!) targeting males have been a fixture of American "how to do it yourself!" culture since at least back in the 40s as our fighting forces came back from the war and started trying to reclaim their lives and build or rebuild homes and communities.
To say we don't think women should be shoved into STEM careers now just because some of us got "woke" is not to say there aren't still roadblocks, sometimes unconscious, to a little girl's path to a tech career if she does find it more interesting than say teaching history or literature. Is it reasonable to put up those roadblocks? Maybe she's good at art but she's forever sketching the veins in leaves and the bark on trees. Maybe your daughter is a budding botanist, arborist. Maybe she's going to end up a politician advocating for preservation of a habitable Earth. And why not?!
Well... if she's also equally good at portrayals of the family cat and the weird light of the moon making grotesque animals out of orchard trees on a summer night, maybe she's not a scientist in the making. Maybe she's a a God given artist and someone should round up the dough to stick that MFA on her resumé by time she's 25 years old.
Further as to women and education: one can without much effort find teachers of history or literature who will testify as to the roadblocks still extant in the old boys' network of academia. We likely read more today about the ideological politics of university life -- for students and faculty as well-- but gender bias towards male dominance in university faculty can persist in the most subtle of ways. The experience of trying to thread the needle between overzealous reform efforts and resistance running to sabotage must be exasperating for administrators and advisory boards... and certainly for all those educators caught in the middle
Be all that however it continues to unfold, in democratically inclined countries now and by their rules of law and constitutions, women are emphatically no longer just someone else's chattel or capital (nor... cattle)
"Chattel": Middle English: from Old French chatel, from medieval Latin capitale, from Latin capitalis, from caput ‘head’. Compare with capital and cattle.
"Cattle": Middle English (also denoting personal property or wealth): from Anglo-Norman French catel, variant of Old French chatel (see chattel).
Nope. Those older views do linger and in some quarters are still enforced. But the next generations of humans benefit more when women's skills, their talents, their view of the world we share are not only permitted but encouraged to be as fully expressed as those of men in the marketplace of ideas, in government and in industry.
We may still be finding our way in helping little girls choose a path forward -- neither pushing her towards STEM nor anything else, nor deterring her from exploring any of those. But we do know that as women gain stature and more of a place in industry, government, the arts, the world at large takes a wider view for all of her children and so for our shared future.
I don't know any women who argue only for success of their daughters, do you?
