Tonight I heard that even among conservative Christians who homeschool their children, there is pressure on young girls to go into a STEM field. The parents I talked to didn't like it because they felt their daughters should be free to follow their interests. But our culture has been encouraging girls to go into math and the other STEM subjects for several decades now, and it isn't working very well. On the other hand, lots of young women major in art history, while few young men do. These are the result of free choices, and no one should care, except that feminists are bothered by one of these and not the other. And why are they bothered? Perhaps they think that there are still barriers to women who want to go into math, but those ended ages ago. And if they still exist, they certainly don't exist for young women in very expensive liberal arts colleges. Yet there too there are few women majoring in math. Maybe feminists fear that if young women and young men make different choices, then people will conclude that women and men are basically different, which they do, and therefore the overthrow of patriarchy is doomed, which it isn't. Patriarchy in the West was basically destroyed some while ago, and indeed one could argue that it is matriarchy that rules our colleges. The insistence that women who claim rape must be believed and that no other evidence need be looked at is one piece of evidence for that claim, and there is a lot more evidence that could be produced (though I won't bother at this time).
Anyway, if you can't get girls interested in math after several decades of prodding them into doing so, it's probably a lost cause.
In my country, of the STEM fields, men have an advantage in engineering and computer sciences. In fields such as biology, chemistry and medicine, there are so many and so well-prepared young women applying for university that there are gender quotes at the entrance exams to prevent full feminization of these fields. Maybe positively engaging high school students of both sexes, showing them that STEM is great, will be more efficient than telling girls that they must go to STEM to show off to those evil patriarchs.
(In the Russian novel "Children of the Arbat" by Rybakov, the main character Sasha Pankratov, an idealistic young communist, is naturally drawn to literature but goes to an engineering school instead, because the Party says that the country needs engineers. He ends up expelled from the university and exiled.)
Posted by: Maya M | 03/21/2017 at 07:06 AM
Speaking of Parties, the first Chinese person I met -- that is, from mainland China and not from the Chinese diaspora -- was someone who had been on a collective farm until things loosened up a bit. He was interested in science, but when they asked him if he wanted to leave the farm to study political philosophy, he jumped at the chance.
Posted by: John Pepple | 03/21/2017 at 12:29 PM