Muriel Kolker is an engineering teacher at Morristown High School in Morristown, NJ. In addition to teaching co-ed introductory engineering classes, Kolker recently taught an all-girls engineering class. She has spent some time studying the topic of women in engineering and learning about the best ways to educate girls. This blog is a part of Kolker’s blog where she writes about diversity in engineering and things she has observed. ECN has proud to host these exclusive blogs, which are available only on ECNmag.com and Kolker’s personal site.
We are the product of our environment.
This is a good thing. Although it may account for the low numbers of girls and minorities in STEM careers, it also implies that, by changing the environment, we can change our destinies.
I received an NPR article from a female colleague today, When Women Stopped Coding. It is a snapshot into a fascinating moment in recent history (recent for those of us who remember the 80’s). The author, Steven Henn, took a look at the percentage of woman majors, by field, over the past 40 years. This is what he found.
Now I love graphical representation of data, and this is exactly why. You can’t look at that graph and deny that something happened. It’s shockingly clear there was some event around 1984, something that caused women to stop pursuing computer science as a career.
Read more: How an all-girls engineering class is changing education
I remember the 80’s. Pacman. Pong. And the advent of the personal computer. Of course at Rutgers we were all still working on the huge mainframes in the basement of the computer science building. I had a job backing up the data onto huge tape rolls every Friday night (before going out to Old Queens). I remember being aware of personal computers, and I remember knowing that I DID NOT KNOW HOW TO OPERATE ONE. They scared me. I had never worked on one before.
Turns out, I wasn’t alone. These things were being purchased as “toys” for high-tech geeks, who were ripping them apart, programming them, and consequently teaching themselves computer science. These toys were marketed by IBM and Apple. And they were marketed to boys. The thing that happened, it seems, is that the PC went into the homes of boys. Which gave the boys in college-level computer science classes a huge advantage.
In 1984, the environment that girls found themselves in was one in which television advertisements were telling us that boys operated computers. Movies like Weird Science, Revenge of the Nerds and War Games dominated the theaters. And computer classes were populated by more boys than girls. The boys knew more, because they had grown up playing with computers. In the article by Henn, the woman being interviews speaks to the feeling that she did not belong in that class, because she didn’t know as much as her peers. Apparently her professor thought so, too. She earned her first C.
Watch more: How do we keep kids in STEM?
This all adds up to an environment that sends the message “you do not belong here.” Which is all it took to take that steeply positive slope and turn it negative.
This story makes me happy. Because it lays bare the impact of how strongly environmental messages contribute to the decisions of our young students. And because the environment is something we can change. New toys like Goldie Blox and Roominate are marketing construction toys to girls. On television we have Kari Byron on Mythbusters and competent women scientists on Bones. Hermione Granger. Even Sandy Cheeks. And science teachers like me are telling our girls in classes every day that they CAN do engineering, or computer science, or math, or construction. The change is happening at a glacial pace, but at least I can say that there is change afoot.
Do you agree?