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.