Years of campaigning means nothing if society hasn't notably changed as a result. It really is our entertainment, half of all television shows for children show men (boys) being innately superior in intelligence [1]. Even worse, there are no children's shows with primary female genius characters (they are all male), and when they do show up as non-primary characters their intelligence is often overshadowed by their feminine attributes.
It's even worse in teen TV, where the smart female characters are more often portrayed as being love interests for male characters over being smart.
And lets not even get into the rampant sexism in most mainstream video games (and their communities), even more important for software engineering and computer science since modding/making/playing video games seems to be a common factor for many male entrants, and relatively uncommon among female entrants to the field (at least in my recent but anecdotal experience).
This all leads to a situation where computers, engineering, science, and math are more often seen as male disciplines. We may have cleaned up a lot of blatant sexism, especially in modern workplaces, but our media is still teaching our children gender bias, often with a detrimental effect for both genders (for example decreasing college rates for males, how many male teen characters care about getting into college, have their shit together, etc).
Years of campaigning means nothing if society hasn't notably changed as a result
It may mean that what the campaign thinks is right is not what people want. It doesn't help that social sciences research on the subject is kind of taboo.
Fair enough. But towards the original point, dismissing a solution to a problem because of the relevant campaigning, and not the relevant changes seems like a pretty poor argument. Additionally, you could also take my statement as meaning, "if the campaigning isn't succeeding, perhaps trying to change the message will help". Which, encouraging STEM for all children, would be a new message that would also likely increase the number of women in STEM (eventually). This is actually a pretty common shift in the "women in STEM" movements as of late.
As a counter argument: There has been lots of campaigning on fixing the problem of limited numbers of women in STEM, but relatively few changes to the media portrayal of women in STEM or education of children to fix the problem. Perhaps more importantly, a vast number of STEM fields are in high demand, and our education system seems to be poorly equipped at encouraging students (in general) to enter (any) STEM field. So perhaps we can hit two birds with one stone and change how we teach STEM to be a more integral part of school, like the original post suggested with a relatively provocative title.
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Years of campaigning means nothing if society hasn't notably changed as a result. It really is our entertainment, half of all television shows for children show men (boys) being innately superior in intelligence [1]. Even worse, there are no children's shows with primary female genius characters (they are all male), and when they do show up as non-primary characters their intelligence is often overshadowed by their feminine attributes.
It's even worse in teen TV, where the smart female characters are more often portrayed as being love interests for male characters over being smart.
And lets not even get into the rampant sexism in most mainstream video games (and their communities), even more important for software engineering and computer science since modding/making/playing video games seems to be a common factor for many male entrants, and relatively uncommon among female entrants to the field (at least in my recent but anecdotal experience).
This all leads to a situation where computers, engineering, science, and math are more often seen as male disciplines. We may have cleaned up a lot of blatant sexism, especially in modern workplaces, but our media is still teaching our children gender bias, often with a detrimental effect for both genders (for example decreasing college rates for males, how many male teen characters care about getting into college, have their shit together, etc).
[1] http://www.truechild.org/PageDisplay.asp?p1=6656
It may mean that what the campaign thinks is right is not what people want. It doesn't help that social sciences research on the subject is kind of taboo.
Fair enough. But towards the original point, dismissing a solution to a problem because of the relevant campaigning, and not the relevant changes seems like a pretty poor argument. Additionally, you could also take my statement as meaning, "if the campaigning isn't succeeding, perhaps trying to change the message will help". Which, encouraging STEM for all children, would be a new message that would also likely increase the number of women in STEM (eventually). This is actually a pretty common shift in the "women in STEM" movements as of late.
As a counter argument: There has been lots of campaigning on fixing the problem of limited numbers of women in STEM, but relatively few changes to the media portrayal of women in STEM or education of children to fix the problem. Perhaps more importantly, a vast number of STEM fields are in high demand, and our education system seems to be poorly equipped at encouraging students (in general) to enter (any) STEM field. So perhaps we can hit two birds with one stone and change how we teach STEM to be a more integral part of school, like the original post suggested with a relatively provocative title.