lettered | Are you there, science? It's me.

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Are you there, science? It's me.

I’ve always wanted to know everything about everything, and I’ve always loved the way everything connects to everything else. Except science.

It always bothered me to say I didn’t like science. If I’m interested in everything, how come I can’t be interested in the most fundamental thing? Science is about what things are, what makes everything the way it is. How could I not be interested?

It occurs to me now that science posits, “reality is”, and maybe I had a problem with that. I am in some ways interested in everything because, “maybe reality isn’t”. Also, maybe it could be said science is reality; everything else is meta-reality, and for some reason the more levels removed from reality you get while still making sense, the more interested I become. It’s probably true of me that I like contemplating the universe more than the universe itself.

But it also bothered me to say I didn’t like science, because—well, it sounded to me like saying you like kids, which I’ve also found sort of ridiculous. Some kids are cool; some kids suck. Some science is nifty; some sucks. Maybe chemistry is awesome and biology blows.

But it’s possible to really just like kids, both cool kids and sucky kids. And I really just didn’t like science.

Then I fell in love. So, okay, I like science now. All of science, not just choice parts of biology. But what I’m interested in right now is why I didn’t like it, and why other people may not. Is it just me, or is this a hard subject to get into? Is it just me, or does it seem like kids will more likely be interested in anything else more than science (or possibly math)? And is it just me, or does it seem like the latter are more often girls?

It’s a gross stereotype. There are plenty of women doctors and astronauts and biologists. But I’m always hearing how tech schools are 90% guys. Companies ache for girl engineers to fulfill their quotas. From what I’ve heard labs are still predominantly male, and while female physicists exist, all the famous ones I know are men.

Is it male oppression? Women still can’t get these high paying jobs? These positions of authority? These careers which require higher thinking, since we all know women have tiny brains?

Is it just taking longer for these fields to open up to women?

Does it have to do with stereotypes of women not being technical-minded, of women being “artsy”, women focusing on “feeling more than fact”?

What do you think? Are you interested in science? Why or why not? What do you think about science? Women in science? The history of women in science, and whether it says anything about how far we’ve come as a society or not?

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Physics, chem and biology are dominated by women at the 'number of students' level around here. (I'm not sure about math -- I know that physics was male-dominated when my elder brothers studied it, and I know that changed, but I don't have math people now to find out the other.)

I do think that science gets an unfair rep in highschool -- we're not taught science properly. They just tell you stuff that seems either random or too common-sense, and then make you memorize it. That's not science.

I know of a camp (a physics prof from the university was involved) that basically took high-school kids and ask them basic physics questions. They learnt physics by finding out the answers, by themselves, with experiments. That is science, and I bet those kids loved it.

I also talk a lot with my now 18yo and 14yo cousins. They say they don't like science, a lot, and have said it since they were little. But they ask me tons of stuff about reality (either biology or chem seems to interest them more), and they hear and remember the answers.

I do think that an emphasis on women in science would've made it easier for me to picture me actually working at it. I still have trouble with it and assume the few boys around know more than I do (not true always!).

They just tell you stuff that seems either random or too common-sense, and then make you memorize it. That's not science.

Omg, yes.

I know of a camp (a physics prof from the university was involved) that basically took high-school kids and ask them basic physics questions. They learnt physics by finding out the answers, by themselves, with experiments. That is science, and I bet those kids loved it.

Hm. What I hated most in science in school was the experiments. You know, where you get to grow a plant, or test chemicals over a Bunsen burner, or build airplanes to see which one will fly best. This was what convinced me in the end that I didn't like science, because teachers would say, "See, this is what science REALLY is!" and I didn't like it, so I must not like science.

Part of my problem with that stuff, I think, is that when scientists do experiments they're usually looking to find out something new. The experiments we had to do in grade school were all about finding out stuff other people already knew, so it always felt . . . pointless.

What I find interesting about science now is that I have people asking me questions that I have to find the answers to. I don't have to run experiments to find out the answers, but I get to go anywhere I want. For instance, in order to talk about the problem of carbon emissions to staff and visitors, I've done everything from mineral identification and composition to looking at the molecular structure of the sugars plants produce when they photosynthesize. Not stuff I usually associate with global warming, and not stuff we connected to global warming in school, even if we did look at minerals and talk about photosynthesis.

I do think that an emphasis on women in science would've made it easier for me to picture me actually working at it.

For me, I feel like there was an emphasis. I was very good at it, better than most boys, and was told over and over I could have a really successful career in it. But I was very averse to it until recently. Though I do wonder if feeling like as a girl who was good at math/science I had a responsibility to have a career in math/science in order to prove girls had minds put me off it.

Well, usually the experiments they make you do are already designed for you. That can be boring (or not, depending on your personal tastes and all that -- I'm a lab rat, and I love experiments and understanding why they work and all that). These kids went to the camp to discover physics laws again, and thus posed the questions in a group and designed the experiments to answer them. Physic teacher(s) were there much as a peer review group, to point out flaws in the design or the conclusions.

I do know that there must be people who don't like designing experiments, but I think that if you don't, in general it's a good bet that you don't like science, because science is basically that struggle to get answers. (Which is fine! I just think much more people would love science if it would be presented as such, and not the bizarre thing they usually teach.)

(I was told I was good at it, too. But, one, I didn't know that many lady scientists who had discovered things and the like, and two, I have two elder brothers who're brilliant, so I pretty much grew up comparing myself to them and failing in my own eyes.)

I recently became interested in getting a second degree, in architecture and engineering, based on my interest in interior design/usability. I took College Algebra and Trig, and then looked out over the four more years of pure mathematics before I would be allowed to design and build anything, and I just flat gave up.

In the abstract, I love science. I'm always interested in pop-science books, and I can tell that the "frontiers" of science are really interesting. But there's so much school between here and there! It seems that all the "low-hanging fruit" has been picked, so to get to the really interesting stuff takes at least 4-5 years of study at the college level. Frankly I'm just not willing to put the time in.

Also, your idea about the camp (and how kids must love it) is exactly the opposite of my experience. I had a high school math teacher who expected us to work out how to do it on our own. It infuriated me. "The answer has already been figured out, people know how to do it, why do I have to start from scratch?" It felt like a waste of time. I had been on track to take AP Calc my senior year of high school, but that teacher ensured that I never took another math class for seven years. (I tested out of my college's GenEd requirement.) It wasn't that I disliked figuring out how to do it, exactly... it was that the person sitting in front of me *knew* how to do it, and weren't telling me.

Anyway. Just my personal experience.

As a woman studying in a very male-dominated field (computer science), I have a theory about the seriously skewed ratios. As I see it we have two main problems:

1) Social stigma. Women are "feeling." They're "nurturing." They have "intuition." They can't think critically, and anyway no guy wants to marry a woman who's smarter than he is, right? And on and on ad nauseum. Let me tell you, if everyone is telling you repeatedly that you can't do something, you really start to think you can't do it.

2) I'm not sure how to explain this. Okay - so I went to an all girls high school. And I took AP Computer Science. There were twelve girls in my class. There I was, learning to program, it was fun! I decided to major in it. I knew it would be male dominated, but hey, no big right? We're all there to learn, gender doesn't matter!

No.

When you're one of one or two women in a class of fifteen, twenty people, you are not a computer science major. You are a female computer science major. You are The Girl. It's not that anyone is creepy or condescending, it just feels like being under a microscope. If I do badly, I have to wonder whether it's because everyone's right and girls really are bad at this, or whether I've proved everyone right and my classmates are now thinking, man, girls just can't keep up. If someone helps me with my homework, is it because I'm their friend or because they're being chivalrous or some shit like that. My point is, even if a girl manages to maintain interest in math or science long enough to actually go into it, chances are she'll leave, because the environment is the opposite of inviting. It's like accidentally wearing jeans to a formal dress party or something. Everyone's too polite to say anything, but you still feel awkward and out of place.

All of which is a long winded way of saying: it's culture. The reason girls aren't interested in science is because we punish them for it.

I didn't feel unwelcome when I was at University (Bio major)...maybe a bit outnumbered, but I'm smart enough that it didn't feel like an issue.

Hmmmm... I imagine individual experiences vary greatly. :) Also, bio has much higher percentage of women than cs, to my knowledge.

*nods* I agree with you there (both on the individual experiences and fewer women in cs than bio)

I read something a while back that professions only begin to undergo a "cultural shift" when about one-third of the practitioners are women. Thus, many sciences, such as medicine, are already very welcoming of women because more than one-third of the students are female. Even math and physics are trending in this direction. Computer science and engineering are the last holdouts, and are still not women-friendly.

In 1989, in Montreal, a frustrated would-be engineer walked into an engineering class at Ecole Polytechnique with a gun. He ordered all the male students and the male teacher to leave, then shot and killed the 14 female students, yelling, "You are all a bunch of feminists!" Then he shot himself. Apparently he had been unable to win a spot in the engineering class and blamed affirmative action for his failures.

So, yeah. I thought twice about studying engineering after that.

Edited 2010-08-25 12:56 (UTC)

Wow.

My dad told me never to be an engineer because I would have to work for The Man. He told my two brothers this too, though.

Interesting. I wish you and

kenaressa had been at Third Place--

elanid and

jaded_grave and I had such an interesting conversation about this!

2) I understand what you mean. On the other hand, I'm not sure I would even notice if I was the only girl in a classroom. Not because I'm so above it all; I'm not trying to say that. But I tend to be very oblivious to everything, and at the same time I sort of feel awkward or out of place wherever I am. I guess what I'm wondering is how much of this feeling is something we girls put on ourselves, rather than a vibe fellow male classmates give off.

1) Definitely. I'd like to say I'm not affected by this, but I grew up loving books like Jane Eyre, where the male in the relationship is older and more worldly and the heroine is a young innocent who Must Learn. That particular dynamic has always really attracted me, but when I think about it I can't think of an example where the woman is the teaching partner and the male is an innocent in the ways of the world. Maybe I would've gravitated toward something different if I had ever been exposed to it.

I've been interested in science since....forever I think. I majored in Biology in University, and now I'm a costume designer ^^;

I'm more interested in Biology on the macro level, instead of the micro and super micro levels that are/were becoming more and more cutting edge (and hence where all the jobs and research positions are...not too many new openings in systems level biology...at lease percentage wise).

And then I decided the art side of me was the one I really wanted to follow. ^____^ Biology and science is still a hobby of mine though!

As I said to

nianeyna, I wish you guys had been at Third Place--

elanid and

jaded_grave and I had such an interesting conversation about this!

The opposite sort of happened to me. I was an English major and never interested in science, but now I work at the science center and love my job. I still plan on being a writer and am interested in many arty things, but I hope I can continue to work in science education (which is different than straight science, but still) for a long while.

Hm, I think it has a lot to do with the way we are brought up. I can't even count how often I heard that girls "had a hard time" with natural sciences and it was a self fulfilling prophesy for me. I sucked in math and physics when I was around 12 (while I was good as a child), but that changed when I got a good chemistry teacher, which is what I ended up studying. Interestingly enough physics there though on a much higher lever didn't bug me at all.

I'm working in computational chemistry at the university now and what I find interesting is how some natural sciences start to have a lot more women, while others still keep up the old myths.

Chemistry hasn't many women, but it is still better than physics or engineering. Fields like Pharmacy or Biology are actually becoming female dominated these days at least as far as students go.

In natural sciences there is a lot of hot air blown around and sometimes I think women fall easier to the myth that everything there must be hard and complicated, when it's really not that hard and people just pretend it is to look smarter.

I think women fall easier to the myth that everything there must be hard and complicated,

Really? That begs the question of why girls would believe that myth more than guys. It's not as though girls are stupider. Do we think we are? Or is it that so much of our history and culture is built on the myth that girls aren't as smart, so we assume we can't do smart things?

Because I was a star at math and science, and better at it than both my brothers and most people in school, I assumed that my complete and utter lack of interest in math and science had more to do with the myth that girls aren't interested in science, rather than the myth that they're not good at science. But I can't draw conclusions based on just me...

I can also only speak for myself, but from my experience with tutoring kids, in many cases boys tend to overestimate themselves, while girls underestimate themselves (that's of course not true for all, but it is a deffinitive tendency).

With girls often the first thing you have to get out of their noggin is that this is (and has to be hard). You wouldn't believe how often I've heard the sentence "But it can't be that easy" from girls. It's really scary, because I see so many who just see a calculation and dispair.

With boys it's often the other way round. They will go at it, even if they don't have the faintest notion what they are doing.

I tend to think these tendencies come from enforced genderroles, where girls are rewarded more for being nice, modest and quiet, while boys tend to get more attention via bragging. It's also interesting to talk to the parents, sometimes I could hit them over the head, when they tell me things like "well, she's a girl" as if it was an excuse for a girl beign crappy in natural sciences.

I really think this XKCD strip sums it up perfectly what goes wrong:
http://xkcd.com/385/

Hee, yes, that comic has come up several times in the past week, since I've been talking about this!

My sister in law linked me to this: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~taylor/WomenAndMathematics.ppt

which I recommend if you can dl/have powerpoint. It's about girls in math.

The problem is, I have trouble understanding the confidence issues, because I'm very self-confident (and downright arrogant, most the time). I used to go around talking about how great I was all the time. I stopped doing it when I hit puberty, and that really may have something to do with being a girl.

Anyway, the slideshow talks about studies in which girls didn't better on tests after being told the tests didn't matter, or that the tests were gender neutral. In general, the less threatening the tests seemed the better girls did on them. It even suggested that something as simple as checking a box stating your sex before a test might influence scores.

It's also interesting to talk to the parents, sometimes I could hit them over the head, when they tell me things like "well, she's a girl" as if it was an excuse for a girl beign crappy in natural sciences.

This shouldn't shock me but it does. Ugh!

This (http://www.slideshare.net/terriko/how-does-biology-explain-the-low-numbers-of-women-in-cs-hint-it-doesnt), this (women & physics powerpoint) (http://www.yale.edu/spsyale/cuwpy/09JanCUWPY.ppt), and this (women & math powerpoint) (http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~taylor/WomenAndMathematics.ppt). Sorry about the powerpoints...

Sarah

Thanks. I really liked the last one. The middle one didn't make sense to me. The first one is fun, but doesn't seem very informative. I'm sure you saw that xkcd comic . . .

I hope you are well!

This is a really thought-provoking article, but I probably have less of a clue than you do about this subject. I've always liked science, at least certain subjects. But I'm terrible at math and I couldn't give a flip about chemistry, physics, or a good portion of biology. I suppose I'm a girl stereotype because I'm good at the arts and I like theoretical science, like Schrodinger's cat and multiple dimensions, psychology, sociology, and almost all of astronomy.

As to your questions, I think a lot of it is bias, but then I also sort of think that women and men are built differently. Yes, women are able to be brilliant scientists and mathematicians and men can be amazing writers and artists, but I also think that for the most part, our brains are different. Women tend to understand the realm of feelings and men the realm of cold hard facts. That doesn't mean that ALL women and ALL men are like this or should be relegated to gender roles or should be stereotyped or stopped from reaching past a glass ceiling, but it does provide an explanation.

Women tend to understand the realm of feelings and men the realm of cold hard facts.

See, this was what I'm wondering about. Is this due to our brain chemistry, or is it due to over 5,000 years of women being told they need to take care of the children while men take care of cold hard facts like building houses and making sure there's enough food to eat? That could be a question of chicken and egg--perhaps the stereotype of women taking care of the kids happened not only due to childbirth, but women having evolved such that they're good at taking care of children (i.e. good with feelings).

I'm definitely for the evolution answer. Natural selection encouraged the genes needed for hearth and home because men married (clubbed and drug to their cave?) the women who had these desirable traits and women picked men who could take care of the family and were the strongest of their tribes. Explanation, but not a reason for discrimination. I tend to be positive about gender roles and the social attitude, because fifty years ago divorce was taboo and a woman in the workplace let alone in power was ridiculous. That's why I kind of loved Star Trek, even though it had moments of gender fail, because of Uhura and because of a throwaway line in Tomorrow Is Yesterday when the captain Christopher was all "a woman?" when he saw a woman in uniform and Kirk is all "crewman." Of course we're even more PC now by using "crew member", but for 1967? It was pretty big for the future to shrug about women in the military.

J, did you get my PM? Sorry to bug but I've gotten like, exactly one reply and I'm freaking out a little bit.

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