Positive role models are vital for encouraging girls into engineering and computer science

Sarah Buhr, TechCrunch Writer and Marissa Mayer, Yahoo President & CEO attend the TechCrunch 10th Annual Crunchies Awards on February 6, 2017 in San Francisco By guest blogger Elizabeth Kirkham Have you heard the riddle about the doctor? A father and his son are involved in a car accident and taken to different hospitals, the boy to a children’s hospital and the father to the general hospital. When the boy arrives at hospital, the doctor on call is shocked, saying “I can’t treat this boy, he’s my son!” The question is: who’s the doctor? The answer, as with many riddles, is obvious once you know it: the doctor is the boy’s mother. Years ago when I first heard this riddle, I was stumped, even though the only doctor I had contact with in my own life happened to be a woman. The very fact that this question works as a riddle is testament to the strength of negative stereotypes surrounding women’s scientific abilities. Women who take degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects do just as well as their male colleagues, even though they are far outnumbered by them: in the UK, only 14 per cent of engineering and technology students, and 17 per cent of computer science students are women. The picture is similar in the USA, where Catherine Riegle-Crumb and Karisma Morton carried out a study, published recently in Frontiers in Psychology, to investigate why the numbers are so low. The researchers focused on the time of life when occupa...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Gender guest blogger Occupational Social Source Type: blogs