Tech or Something Else? Why Not Both?

Talking to high school students, one of the most common things I hear is in the form "I really like [STEM field] but I have a passion for [arts/humanities field]."  As in, "I really love science, but I'm really into music" or "I love math, but I really want to study French."  College catalogs and job descriptions conspire to give people the impression that you have to pick just one field, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Technology touches nearly every aspect of society. Everything from advertising to zoo-keeping has benefited from technology.  The innovations that enable game-changing improvements often come from people who have a passion and experience in two or more fields. Combining substantive knowledge in one area with technical know-how creates a very powerful combination.

Have Confidence to Learn by Teaching

JennyxYoung

Lack of confidence is one of the biggest roadblocks to success, especially in STEM fields.  By now, it is well known that Impostor Syndrome, which disproportionately impacts professional women (but affects many men as well), causes the affected to doubt themselves and ultimately under-perform their potential.  Related confidence deficiencies cause women to downplay their successes in performance reviews, not apply for positions unless they are certain they meet 100% of the qualifications, and dwell on any minor shortcoming.  You don't have to get to the workforce for these confidence issues to crop up - they happen in school as well.

In Math is Hard, But So Is Everything Else, I wrote about how it's natural to feel stuck at times.  But how can we get unstuck?  One way is to try to teach someone else the concepts you barely understand.   Doing this requires healthy dose of confidence, but it doesn't require you to actually be an expert. 

Cultural Blind Spots

This excellent article puts into perspective how 'geek culture' can exclude otherwise very capable individuals who do not fit neatly in its bounds. This is one of the forms of subtle bias I commonly refer to - it's not that someone makes a conscious decision to hire only young white men for their tech startup, but it tends to happen anyway.  It's difficult in an interview to identify the kind of spark that makes someone a good engineer - you want to find people with the right mix of technical know-how, creativity, problem-solving skills, and dedication to make great things.  You can test for technical know-how, and references can help determine dedication, but creativity and problem-solving skills are a lot harder to identify.  So it's no surprise that companies come up with questions about superpowers and surviving a zombie apocalypse because they are fun scenarios that can demonstrate creativity and problem-solving skills.  However, these scenarios play off of fiction genres that tend to appeal much more to men than women.  These scenarios aren't relevant to the work in the company (unless the product is related to zombies or superpowers in some way), so tying hiring decisions to these kinds of questions unnecessarily biases hiring against women.

Many women who succeed in heavily male dominated tech fields have adopted the culture - whether out of genuine interest, feigned interest in an attempt to fit in, or cultivating an actual interest upon making an attempt to fit in.  But for many others who have the aptitude and interest in the science and technology of it all, but are unable or unwilling to adapt to the culture, the existence of this culture serves as a barrier to entry.

This is the kind of thing that all of us need to be conscious of - on the hiring side to reflect whether we are inadvertently missing great candidates and on the job-seeking side to make sure we don't get caught in someone else's cultural blind spot.

2^11

Sometimes the best way to learn is to not realize you're learning.  The game 2048 is like that.  The goal is very simple - you combine merge blocks of the same number into one with the combined value.  For example, if you combine two '4' blocks (2^2), you make one '8' block (2^3).  Two '8' blocks make a 16 block (2^4) and so on.  The goal is to create a 2048 block (2^11).  After each move, a block appears randomly somewhere on the board - usually a 2, but sometimes a 4.

This is a very fun and natural way to get comfortable with powers of 2, which is an important concept in computing.  I'm sure the creator of this game did not intend it to be an educational game, but it's just one of the little ways that you can pick up important concepts in unconventional ways.

No, I'm not writing a blog post solely to justify the hours I've wasted playing this game.  Why do you ask?

Targeted Programs and Backlash

The Don't Look Down post explores the message that targeted programs can send to the targets.  In this post, I take on the message that targeted programs send to the non-targeted.  As a reaction to these programs, men can develop resentment and prejudice against women.  Below I discuss this phenomenon, why that belief is a problem for all of us, and what programs I prefer because they don't foster this reaction.

Meeting Our Future Engineers

Last week I had the honor of meeting about a dozen students from my alma mater at a networking event.  They were visiting Washington, DC to get a sense of what engineering is like in the "real world" (if you can call DC the "real world") by spending a day shadowing hosts (including myself) at various government agencies, research labs, and companies.

At the networking reception, I had the opportunity to speak with engineering students in several different programs.  Most of these students are sophomores and are just starting to figure out what they want to do with their lives.  I spoke with one young woman studying mechanical engineering who is interested in designing roller coasters.  One young man studying chemical engineering is trying to decide between going into manufacturing of pharmaceuticals or entering the growing field of natural gas extraction in his home state of Pennsylvania.  One young engineer is on her way to a career defending networks from cyber-attacks, another is looking to use his background to help shape policy.

Talking to these students, I'd have no idea there was a shortage of women engineers.  The group was evenly split between men and women, and all of the students impressed me.  The statistics show we have a lot of work to do still, but it was nice to be in a room of engineers and not be heavily outnumbered.

Pi is for Everyone

Source: Wikipedia

The formulas, jargon, and code in this post may not be the best way to prove that STEM is for everyone, but it's Pi Day, and I think it's good to keep in mind that things we take for granted now were once considered extremely difficult.  According to CNN, it's cool to like pi.

So today, in honor of Pi Day, I decided to refresh my memory and sharpen my programming skills by implementing Viète's Forumla. Viète's formula, developed in 1593, expands on the Archimedes method of approximating pi developed around 250 B.C.  This method relies on computing the circumference of regular polygons with many sides. As you increase the sides of the polygon, it gets closer and closer to being a circle, and thus, the ratio of the perimeter to the "diameter" gets closer to the value of pi.

Math Is Hard - But So Is Everything Else

The first time I swung a golf club, I missed the little white ball entirely (and the second time I made pretty solid contact with the big green ball - ouch!).  Once I started hitting the golf ball reliably, it didn't go very far. Once I started to hit it a bit farther, it didn't go where I wanted.  And once it started going more or less where I wanted, I couldn't figure out how to shape my shots.  And so on.  At each step, I was tempted to give up - unsure if I would ever be good enough to play with friends and colleagues (and frankly, I still am).  But the truth is that I always could get better with some more practice.

Like golf, math takes practice.  "I'm not good at math" is just code for "I don't want to practice anymore." And just like you can get muscle fatigue and reach a point where practicing is counterproductive, you can get brain fatigue as well.  But if you give yourself a chance to recover and come back to it later, maybe try a different approach or work on a different skill, you will be able to get past it.  

I think this video sends a pretty compelling "stick with it" message and I'd encourage anyone who thinks they don't have a brain for math to watch it:

Do Women Hold an Irrational Fear of Lower Grades?

Yesterday, a friend pointed out this new piece at the Washington Post, which exposes an issue that women tend to shy away from subjects where they are likely to struggle - instead sticking to areas where they expect to receive higher grades.  According to studies cited in that article, "women might also value high grades more than men do and sort themselves into fields where grading curves are more lenient."  Female students apparently do in fact receive higher average grades than male students, but female students also drop out of STEM majors at a higher rate than male students.  


This article immediately reminded me of studies that show that praising young children for effort rather than intelligence encourages them to work through problems when they encounter them.  In contrast, praising intelligence or achievement conditions children to do things they know they will succeed at.  For some reason, parents and teachers both tend to praise effort more in boys and achievement more in girls.  The result is that girls are feel encouraged to do things they know they will be good at, while boys are more apt to try something new and risk failure.  I suspect that this conditioning may in part explain the phenomenon discussed in the WaPo piece.


To some extent, students who seek easier classes may be doing the right thing.  In life we are judged on our output and not our effort.  So applying one's skills where they are more suited is not completely unreasonable.  But I see it as a problem if women are self-selecting out of tech fields at a higher rate just for fear of messing up a perfect GPA. GPA's don't matter as much as you think they do.

Making STEM Interesting: Programming Edition

As careers go, being an engineer is pretty great. Engineers tend to work fewer hours than other comparably paid professions, and engineers report a higher job satisfaction than most other professions as well.  But the problem is that while being an engineer isn't that hard, becoming an engineer can be.  Engineering is considered one of the hardest majors at college, and it's even harder without a strong foundation before that.  It's not easy to convince a teenager that it's worth all the extra work now for a payoff in the distant future.

So the payoff needs to be immediate.  And it can be.  In this post, I'll focus on programming.  What really motivates me to write computer programs is the ability to do something useful and/or fun.  In particular, I like to be able to see immediate visual results as proof that I am doing something.

Some examples of relatively easy projects with high visual impact after the jump:

Fictional Role Models

Many of us see more scientists and engineers in TV and movies than we do in real life.  These images shape our perception of what scientists and engineers look like and how they are supposed to act - even when the plot is wholly unrealistic.

My favorite portrayals of female scientists and engineers in the movies are where it is so natural that you don't realize there is anything weird.  When it seems authentic and believable that the woman you see would be in her position.  Where the woman is a full-fledged member of the team and not there primarily to be someone's love interest or merely to be a token female.  Where the woman is competent and qualified (though not necessarily perfect). Where as the show develops she may encounter some of the sexism that is far too common in technical fields, but where highlighting those kinds of problems is not the reason she is in the show.

Some of my favorite examples of this after the jump.  Post your favorites in the comments.

It’s the little things

My father is an engineer, and he never missed an opportunity to bring science and engineering into daily life.  Whether it was setting up our first computer (a Commodore 64) or balancing the chemicals in the fish tank, he made sure we all knew what he was doing, why he was doing it, and how to figure things out. 

One of my most vivid memories as a very young child was during a road trip to the beach one summer.  Getting sick of being crammed in the backseat with me, I’m sure, my older sisters (ages 10 and 11) asked how much longer until we arrived.  Rather than tell them how long it would be, my father said that we were about 100 miles away and traveling at 55 miles per hour, and reminded them that rate times time equals distance.  I was 5 and certainly did not understand multiplication, but even at that age I absorbed the important lesson that an answer could be obtained through a process – it was not simply a fact to be stated.  

I think there are a few lessons to be learned here:

1. Kids are never too young for math or science.  Just because the kids doesn't yet have the full foundation to understand what is happening, there is value in introducing them to scientific thinking.
2. There are all kinds of daily experiences that can be explained with math and science.  Any time you fix something or assemble something or learn something new, you are going through a process.  Share that process with the children around you.
3. This is an example of privilege.  I was privileged to have an engineer for a parent.  I was privileged that that parent wanted to share his thinking with me.  Not everyone has this experience at home, so it needs to be provided at school and in other daily interactions.  And we need to understand that just because a child doesn't immediately respond to the interaction doesn't mean they aren't getting it.

Don't Look Down!

I often muse that one of the reasons I was able to develop a love for science and technology as a child was that nobody ever told me girls weren’t supposed to do that stuff.  The first law of cartoon physics  is that you don’t fall until you notice the lack of ground below.   Nobody ever pointed out to 8-year-old me that she was the only girl on her Odyssey of the Mind team.  People were far more likely to remark about my age than my gender when 12-year-old me attended meetings of local BBS SysOps.  What you don’t think about can’t bother you. 

There are many well-intentioned programs to encourage girls to try coding and science and building toys aimed at girls.  But is the very notion that we need these programs and toys giving girls a reason to doubt themselves? The message "you can do it, even though you're a girl"implies that being a girl is an impediment to doing it.  The message "here is a building toy for girls" says that other building toys are not for girls.  Before girls hear these messages, did they already know the negative implication?  I don't think I did at that age.

Shouldn't we be working to make it normal for girls to like to play with legos and to be good at math rather than emphasizing how abnormal it is?  It's not a stretch - every year 13,000 women graduate with degrees in engineering (and many more in math, computer science, and other science fields) and most of us were there as children, building things, programming things, making things.  I think we should be trying harder to ensure that kids don't ever hear the message that it's abnormal, rather than focusing on trying to correct that message after it's been received.

Are we doing it wrong?

A lot of effort is being expended these days on getting girls into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), as it should be.  According to NSF statistics, women make up about 20% of the college graduates in engineering generally and only 12% of the college graduates in computer science and electrical engineering.   And yet, despite these efforts, the percentages declined throughout the 2001-2010 timeframe (more recent comprehensive data was not readily available).

So something clearly isn't working.  I have some hypotheses that I will explore through this blog.  Some of the first things I will explore are:

• Whether overtly targeting young girls (elementary and middle-school level) for STEM programs may be counterproductive
• Whether certain types of programs set young women up for failure and how to restructure those programs to be more effective
• How college-age women (and to some extent, men) need to be made aware of factors like impostor syndrome that foster self-doubt and undermine one's ability to succeed
• How we can foster an interest in math and scientific thinking at a very young age

My ideas are formed from a combination of personal experiences, discussions with other women in my field, and from articles and statistics I have come across.  I invite everyone - women and men, those who have succeeded in STEM fields and those who have not, to share their experiences through comments, but please be civil.