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Originally Posted by dashrendar4454
why? Why not just let girls make whatever decisions they want?
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Originally Posted by Dbones
Why force it if they don't want to do that? Why is it so important to incentive women to do something that they themselves haven't decided to do? This is the same thing as people saying police departments are racist because they don't hire more blacks although no blacks applied. I don't get it.
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Because we, sometimes subconsciously, give signals to each gender to what "roles" are acceptable for them to take on later in life. That is an absurd thing to do.
Whether we want to admit it or not, what our adults are doing have an effect on what our children think of the world. If a girl doesn't see a lot of women in STEM fields, she'll get the message that maybe that isn't something she should even think about getting into.
By offering incentives to have girls check out these areas, you let them judge for themselves whether they actually have an interest in those fields or not. Wouldn't you actually want the girls themselves to be the ultimate judges on whether they find that work interesting or fulfilling? Rather than some societal stereotype on those fields?
My sister when she was little wanted to be a hockey player because I was too...and she was told "no, that's a boys game"...
You know what, though, she said "eff that" and still played anyways. She played with boys until she was about 14 (even when they started checking). Around that time, she was lucky enough that women's hockey was burgeoning and coming on the scene. She started playing with girls, and kept going. She then went on to play into her collegiate years.
If she had listened to the naysayers, she wouldn't have even tried that sport. She would have just stuck with figure skating (which was something she did try, but didn't like it as much as hockey).
And thankfully, because of girls like my sister, other little girls saw that they could play this game, too (previously mainly for boys/men only).
This kind of thing should happen in STEM. Let the girls decide if they like it or not. And I think you'll be surprised to learn that some girls who wouldn't give those fields a second look because they're conditioned to think they should go off and do something "appropriate" for their gender, actually would end up liking STEM work.
I work with a few women who went into science, even though other people thought it was nerdy or not for girls...and they love it. One girl told me that her parents wanted her to do something else...but she had a great role model teacher when she was younger that showed her how awesome science was. She fell in love with the field and never looked back.
Get enough of these kind of women in science, and you start building that feedback loop back to the children of today...
We're in a better place than we used to be in regards to this stuff, but we should continue to work on it as a society.