Comment on Transitioning in STEM
andros_rex@lemmy.world 15 hours agoA couple other stories:
When I was in high school, I was in Botball for a while. I was the only girl in the coding team - there was another girl on the construction team that was mostly tagging along with her boyfriend (I’m not saying this to demean her, she was a friend.)
The guy who was teaching us to code refused to teach me enums. He was talking about structs, my eyes looked glazed over because I didn’t get to eat lunch at school lol - he made some joke about losing me and said it was too advanced for me.
I also was getting really into Linux at the time - playing with things like Compiz Fusion on a shitty laptop during lunch (again, I didn’t get to eat lol). I wanted to make a cell phone game - I think I had a Nokia at the time. So I downloaded some sample project and opened it in Netbeans or whatever. It showed up as covered with red squigglies, because I didn’t have the libraries, but the group of coders walked passed, saw the squiggles and started joking about how shit at coding I was and how stupid.
sudneo@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
That genuinely sucks. I think that school is far from perfect even in my experience, and yet reading this I can’t help but feeling so disconnected from it. My experience has been so different.
To give some different anecdotal experience:
My class of 31 in first grade saw 5 new students over the course of the 5 years. 10 people graduated. In the class, 2 female students were genuinely encouraged to be point of almost be privileged in subjects like technical drawing or math. They are the only ones that ended up leaving school with the highest grade (both of them Physics PhD now). In comparison a male student was objectively brilliant. The kind of guy who could figure out physics formulas on his own, great at math Olympics etc. Didn’t pass the last year, among other reason due to absences. No teacher ever encouraged him, and he was treated like just a guy who didn’t want to do anything. Had a strange family situation, but anyway, ultimately now works in the family bar (which is nothing bad, of course, but a massive waste of potential).
I think despite all the limitations, all the problems, my school experience was not one where these kinds of stereotypes were present. Our study groups have always been mixed etc. All our math, physics, biology, chemistry teachers have been female but one.