Science is Natural for Everyone

Someone's been reading this blog.

Well maybe not, but Girls Love Science. We Tell Them Not To. from The Daily Beast echoes the points I've been trying to make - that so many of the attempts to get girls interested in STEM start from a premise that science is unnatural.  The article quotes astrophysicist Katie Mack who says "Gender-based socialization, and messages [ ] that tell girls that science is an unnatural thing for them to do, are incredibly pervasive in our culture."

The article is a spectacular take-down of the idea that science has to be made "girly" to be appealing to girls.  It tells us to toss aside the notion that "[g]irls will love science, [as] the EU has suggested, because Bunsen burners look like lipstick and fiber-optic cables are sort of like powder brushes."

Finally, the article quotes another female astrophysicist, Meg Urry, who notes "Discrimination isn’t a thunderbolt, it isn’t an abrupt slap in the face. It’s the slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success."

A+++++ would read again!

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.