If you keep telling girls they're less good at science, that will probably be self-fulfilling. But there are quite a lot of women who are good at it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
One of the reasons I like working with schools is to try to convince women that they can be scientists and that science can be fun.
Women tend to be more intuitive, or to admit to being intuitive, and maybe the hard science approach isn't so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.
I feel it is now my duty to speak to young women, to encourage them to have careers and, particularly, careers in science.
All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.
It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.
For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.
I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.
Though women are no longer barred from university laboratories and scientific societies, the idea that they are innately less suited to mathematical science is deeply ingrained in our cultural genes.
I love math and science, and also, my mom is a doctor. I grew up not even having an awareness that women were not supposed to be good at science.
I still meet old-school scientists who are like, 'Oh honey, women aren't good at science.' You kind of dismiss them as insane.
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