Boys vs Girls -
Why women dont want to be engineers
Today I have read a “comment” published in the IET’s online magazine on the now infamous Google female/male memo and this evening I’ve watched a program on BBC2 on girls and boys and societies subconscious role enforcement.
The IET article by Pelle Neroth went to great pains to agree with the Google’s James Damore on how our biology forced a gender bias. By contrast the BBC program was examining how we as parents and adults force children into specific gender roles. Indeed Professor Gina Rippon explained that there was almost no difference between the male and female brain at birth and that the “plastic” brain is moulded by the influences that society put on a child. The differences between boys and girls are there because we (society) have TAUGHT them different skills and different mental attitudes.
The BBC program looked at how we force gender stereotypes on children from babies – in one experiment they swapped the clothes of 2 babies and asked child-minders to play with them. They gave the “boy” toys such as plastic robots and shape sorters and the “girl” was given dolls. When interviewed afterwards they said that the “boy” liked the toy robot best and the “girl” liked the doll best. Of course it was revealed that the “boy” was in fact a girl dressed in trousers and a top and the “girl” was a boy in a dress. Interesting that the “boy” baby was the one given the toys to help develop “his” spatial awareness.
So are the differences we see in jobs at the age of 20+ because we have taught our girls to not be so good at analytics, engineering and maths? Instead of giving up our programs promoting engineering to women do we need to start earlier – probably when they are babies?
When I started in IT after just having graduated as an Engineer, I was really pleased to see an almost 50-50 split between women and men in the IBM Systems Engineering 101 class. I.T. was regarded as an extension of the finance department in those days as computers were originally installed to manage the accounts. Strange how the gender imbalance between women and men in I.T. has got worse over the years as Finance lost control and management of I.T. ………
After all if there is a biological reason why women are not queuing up to be Engineers then we don’t need to run all these programs to try and equalise the numbers in the profession do we? We don’t need to look at subconscious bias in schools and we don’t need to encourage all babies to play with toys that promote spatial awareness. It’s nothing to do with our work practices or environment or attitudes – it’s just a biological fact. And that’s a great excuse for not fixing it. And that lets our society off the hook.
Well I am a Chartered Engineer. And a woman. And a biological oddity.