beccastareyes

I'll blog more later, but have a book for now.

I read most of Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness Quartet as a teenager, before the modern YA trend got started. And, well, she writes a good blog and is sort of local to me, and I have several friends who are fans of her. And, honestly, once I got past my teenaged years, I got a lot less insecure about reading 'kids books'.

( So, I picked up her other world of books, the Magic Circle ones, which follow four orphaned youngsters from different backgrounds who end up having a semi-rare sort of magic for a certain craft or set of things. )

Psych-Out Sexism: The innocent, unconscious bias that discourages girls from math and science.

This article argues that some of the 'leaky pipeline' -- the fact that women drift away from science and math at a proportionately higher rate than men when you go from high school to college to grad school to a career -- is based partially on biases about whether science is inclusive. Basically, it cites some studies done that show female high school students are more willing to tackle a tough math problem on a test when a female math major is proctoring the exam (rather than a male math major), and that female students with a female professor become more willing to volunteer answers in class and go to office hours than if they have a male professor. I've seen other studies that show students two advertisements for a science program and both male and female students identify the mixed-gender pictures as seeming more welcoming than the predominantly-male pictures.

It's a bit discouraging, since it's kind of a self-perpetuating cycle unless you ask women to work their butts off to get the next generation into the field. I know I've met female professors who've mentioned being asked to be on ALL THE COMMITTEES so they aren't all-male, which takes them away from the parts of the job they like. Teaching is fun, but I think I'd start to resent it if I was constantly asked to do it instead of cool science things.

I don't know how much I was affected by things like this. My stepmother is a scientist, and I had mostly female science and math teachers in middle and high school -- from 7th grade*, only my high school physics teacher was male and the math teacher I had for a month in seventh grade before I was moved up a year.

OTOH, it's one reason Nancy, our outreach coordinator, is particularly happy when we have both male and female grad students (or anyone) helping. Because it's good for the public to see scientists that aren't all men.

* Which was when we got teachers dedicated to each subject. In 6th grade, two teachers were in charge of wrangling the gifted and talented classes, and they traded off subjects.