Respecting both is key to bringing girls into the sciences.

By Susan E. Matthews

When deciding what college to attend, I wouldn’t even consider an all-girls school, despite my mother’s encouragement. I refused to believe that my life had been even a little bit different because I was a girl — though years later as a woman in science, I’ve rethought that assumption.

I knew that my mom had to do gymnastics while the boys in her elementary PE classes had played basketball. I also knew that in her first job, as a computer scientist for a small company, she had been asked to answer the phones when they were between secretaries because she was the only woman in the office. As far as I was concerned, this sort of discrimination was a thing of the past, not something affecting my life. I felt like I was in the clear.

But we are not quite in the clear. We may value girls more, but there are still gaps. One of those gaps exists in the sciences — itself an area that we do not value nearly enough. While I did go to a co-ed school, studied science, and worked in a biogeochemistry lab, I’m in the minority. In 2009–2010, women represented less than a quarter of all students in secondary or post-secondary education studying STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) topics nationally. This disparity has led to great debate over the reasons for the discrepancy. In early February, in a piece addressing the validity of recent findings, two researchers wrote in the Guardian that to resolve this issue, we could continue to insist that young women make up the difference themselves, by finding their own mentors and paving their own way. But beyond individual industry, we can change our institutions. As Chris Chambers and Kate Clancy argue:

The broader societal constraints that lead so few girls to consider themselves “science people” by middle school derive not from whether we push them into science, but what we value in girls as a culture .

And, I’d argue, what we value in science. I recently had the chance to be in a place that helps girls consider themselves “science people” by the time they leave middle school and to value science itself. As a science writer, I was invited to an all-girls, STEM-focused school to talk to the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders about what I do. Susan D’Auria, the teacher who invited me, is an English major turned math teacher who has been teaching at the school for 10 years and oversaw its transformation into a STEM-focused institution. When you meet Susan, it’s immediately obvious that she is committed to her task of getting the girls excited about STEM: Her classroom is cluttered with the makings of paper models of rollercoasters for one project, and she runs through at least five other examples of things they’ve just completed or are about to start. I was asked to be a guest because she wanted to show the girls that careers in science extend beyond being a researcher. Before my arrival, she had the girls to write down some questions for me, and before I spoke, she let me in on the first question she planned to ask me after my presentation. One of the girls had written, “Is she ‘normal’? Does she wear a lab coat every day to work?”

In the 20 minutes I had to mull that one over before answering it, I made a decision. For an audience of middle school girls where I was a guest, I was unwilling to take too much of a chance, so I turned the question on them, asking them if I seemed normal. I even tried to poke a little fun at the idea of striving to be normal, anyway, adding that I loved my job, so who cares? But the truth is that for middle school girls, being normal matters a great deal (heck, being normal even mattered for me as I picked my college — coming from a co-ed public school, an all-girls private school didn’t feel so ‘normal’). As part of her program, Susan does her best to bring science into the world that the girls already live in and love. Their projects dig into the science, mathematics, technology, and engineering that exist within things like fashion, jewelry making, or cooking. But even in explaining this to me, she worriedly added that she tries to bring science to a world they already inhabit, not dictate what their world should be. Susan also noted that she knows her students have a harder time with math compared to literature, writing, or science because “mathematics is its own language” and requires a different mental effort from the other three subjects. It is, she said, a subject that can be (poorly) taught by just requiring “regurgitating information without applying it to solve a problem.”

But perhaps this answer is more telling than anything else. Aside from the effort that girls themselves can put into finding a mentor and sticking it out in the male-dominated science world, there is also the idea that we can change how we value girls, as a culture. We can, and we should, but this will do nothing if we don’t also change how we value science and STEM as a culture. Rather than reward regurgitation, we should shift our focus to value learning over test-taking, showing all students that it’s OK to experiment and fail; that in fact, you can learn quite a bit more from doing than from memorizing. We should value the science professions, funding them so they thrive and continue to provide opportunities for new graduates. And we should listen to the results that scientific research produces — the findings that explain climate change, identify mental illness as a disease, not a defect, urge a more preventative attitude when making decisions about our health.

Perhaps middle school girls will always wonder if the guest speaker coming in to speak with them is going to be weird — that’s the nature of being in middle school. But as much as we must put effort into valuing girls, our attempt to balance the gender discrepancies in STEM will not come to fruition unless we equally value science.

All images credit: Wesley Fryer, via Flickr. Some rights reserved.

 

[Susan E. Matthews is a freelance science journalist in Brooklyn, and currently works as an editorial fellow at Popular Science. She kept an unreasonable number of journals as a child, but her tendency to take note of every detail now pays off as she builds her career as a writer. In college, she studied the environment, and spent many hours working in a biogeochemistry lab, which confirmed her suspicion that research was not, in fact, for her. She has written for OnEarth, NBC News, Nature Medicine and Bloomberg Businessweek. You can find her on Twitter or at her personal blog.]