Boys left behind at school while girls get trip

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Recently my sons class went on an educational trip to a local university. But only the girls. The boys were left behind with a cover teacher listening to music and generally doing very little. My son is GCSE year and would have benefited from a computing and science event. No it was only for the girls with no mention of anything for the boys. I understand this was a STEM event for girls only but if there was a STEM event for boys only there would be uproar! AIBU?

@echt

Boys who want to go into traditionally women’s jobs Andrew professions are welcomed with open arms.

There is a big push to get girls into science, hence why they are invited to so many events and the boys are left behind. I understand the rationale but we are still discriminating by gender.

It’s positive discrimination, which is perfectly legal and has a purpose.

I agree with you, it is unfair, but like others have said they are trying to encourage women into STEM areas. My husband is a software developer, and there are 2 only females, the rest work in admin or HR in his company.

there's nothing to encourage the boys to do traditionally female professions. Because many girls will go into STEM if encouraged.

Society isn't quite ready for the other, yet! I'd be more impressed with OPS stance if she had said that there was no day out for boys to look at nursing, caring, PA, houskeeper, sales assistant, SAHP, childcare, receptionist, TA, cook (not chef), clerk and chief bottle washer!

@BertrandRussell as are girls who want to go into traditionally male professions - it's not the 70s! But they're not making those choices. I'd like to see encouragement on both sides.

Yanbu

I have a coding husband and 3 sciencey stem loving kids( 2 boys and a girl),

Dh struggles to get the skills needed into his workplace even after resorting to traveling round unis.As a country we have severe skills shortages in coding/ stem. Ie we need boys and girls.Ie both sectors need encouraging.

One of my dc is very able dt coding having been identified as G& T. He has had zilch in secondary to encourage him Now if all had been taken on a trip and the girls’ trip was an extra I’d have had less of an issue.

Secondly GCSE is way too late. They need to be coding in primary and have actually picked computer science at GCSE. Many girls don’t. A few months before GCSEs is not the time to be encouraging anybody. At this stage it will have little bearing on the result and thus take up of the subject further.Also this is not the time to be missing out on a once/ twice weekly lesson at most,particularly for the boys left doing sfa.

I've got sons and this really wouldn't bother me. It's extremely difficult to change imbalanced staffing ratios as people tend to recruit in their own image. And then there is tokenism, so women will be recruited for acceptable professional roles, e.g. head of HR in an engineering company rather than chief engineer or CEO. Or into a role where there are already women, like medicine (where they tend to become GPs rather than surgeons!), rather than a more traditionally male role, like engineering. When things are truly equal then we can sit back and stop having to change things.

DP will be running workshops this year focused at girls at GCSE level. DP is a digital engineer working on some nuclear projects right now, they have no girls on their team at all. DP is only 21 and so are a couple of members of his team and they're hoping being close in age to the GCSE students will encourage some of the girls to join their team once they've finished school. I personally think it's amazing!

I have sons and a daughter and this doesn't bother me at all. My sons know that their choices aren't restricted by their gender and I would like my daughter to feel the same.

When my youngest was little, I went to a ‘Surestart’ course to learn how to manage and style my childs’s afro hair.

A parent complained that it was discriminatory so the Surestart centre had to stop it.

Along with the breastfeeding group and the under 21s group for young mothers and the Dads group.

Sometimes it is a benefit to people to be with other people with something in common with them.

You might not be able to speak out about how hard you are finding it to be 20 and a mother to mothers who are doing it for the third time and are in their 30s.

Why should encouraging girls into STEM be at the detriment to the boys?!

Why can’t we encourage all into STEM?

Girls should be encouraged, but boys shouldn’t be discouraged or have it implied that they shouldn’t bother or don’t matter.

savoy

I cant believe they would listen and cancel. All sound extremely useful groups.

Why is the answer always to cancel something rather than add an extra one that they receive suggestions for.

How can someone object to people learning how to do hair

How is it at the detriment of the boys? They are in exactly the position they would be if there was no "girls in STEM" presentation.

“@BertrandRussell as are girls who want to go into traditionally male professions - it's not the 70s! ”

Really?

“Along with the breastfeeding group and the under 21s group for young mothers and the Dads group.”
I suspect that might have been due to funding and staffing rather than discrimination. That was certainly the case at ours.

'getting into stem careers' is such a vague phrase to me. I know stem =science, technology, enginering and maths but what exactly is a 'stem job'?
There are probably 1000s of jobs that could come under that vague phrase and I believe both girls and boys need guidence and advice and encouragement in those. I am honestly baffled by those who say for boys 'everyday is about stem for them' or 'boys toys are all about stem'. That's not what I have found. I have never heard someone say to a boy 'when you grow up you can work in stem' because it's a vague and meaningless phrase unless you are actually giving advice in actual jobs. Someone up thread say they are at uni doing a 'stem degree' but what does that lead to? What is the goal? What actual jobs will come out of it? That's what BOTH boys and girls need to know.

Research shows that due to socialisation, stereotypes, lack of visible role models and ingrained gender bias, girls are underrepresented in Maths, Engineering and Physics. There are many classroom behaviours that go to reinforce this including but not limited to the number of girls already taking these subjects. Girls who do participate are likely (in our school at least) to out perform the boys but this is in a large part due to the fact that those who do stick it out are highly motivated. The girls already have a mountain to climb and are disadvantaged in the STEM classroom as male voices dominate and they are less likely to be heard or have peers of the same sex they can work well with. In fact, research shows that they are more likely to be in a position where they help weaker students rather than be pushed by the higher achieving students.

And in Universities, despite there being many female scientists and the fact that female departments tend to be more productive in term of research and publication, when it comes to positions of power and attracting funding, it is men who are in these positions.

When there is no gender pay gap and women share an equal voice in society in areas of politics, power and money, then we will no longer need events which support girls. Until then, women need all the support they can get.

The average UK salary for men is £30k, for women it is £25k. By profession, financial services and IT / Software command higher than average salaries so if we are to redress the balance, this is where the focus needs to be.

It is at the detriment of boys as it is 3 months before GCSEs. There are shortages in STEM full stop. Both boys and girls need to be encouraged.

The time for such a trip was months ago in order to avoid GCSE disruption. It also should have been an extra, on top of encouragement for both boys and girls.

I love the idea of having the boys day about breaking in to traditionally female dominated professions.

I can't see this actually happening in real life, because we don't place a lot of value in those career paths.

I work in STEM. I’m the only woman in a team of eleven and I’d say that is about the proportion of women to men on avarage where I work.

It wasn’t always this way. When I started years ago it was around 40/60 split.

We can’t do enough to encourage young women into the field.

Hopefully there will be an event encouraging boys into health and social careers such as: Nursing, social work, teaching, Allied Professions, care work then.

I'm an engineer and have worked in the oil and gas industry for twenty years and while things are slowly improving in terms of women entering the industry we are a long way from parity. Most of the companies I have worked for over the years have worked closely with local schools in terms of arranging work experience, attending career fairs or giving presentations to pupils in a bid to promote engineering as a career and to put it bluntly the phrase 'you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink' comes to mind when dealing with female pupils. The teachers I have dealt with are trying hard to promote engineering as a career to these girls but at the end of the day there is a general disinterest no matter how bright they may be. Generally speaking, the boys are the only interested ones when discussing big engineering projects, who ask plenty of questions, who get excited at the prospect of working overseas or domestically in challenging environments or dealing with cutting edge technology and its the girls who are generally glazing over with boredom while staring into their phones. The teaching staff I have dealt with over the years have seen repeatedly girls achieving top grades in physics and maths A levels only for them to go off and study languages or some other humanities degree at uni.

There were just four women on my course at uni out of an intake of about 60 undergraduates. Engineering departments are not exactly known for being 'cool' and the stereotype of 'nerds' still kind of holds true today, it is a subject that is basically still seen by many as being difficult and time consuming, up there with computing. I also know from first hand experience such is the demand by companies to recruit more women engineers that if there two candidates of equal merit with one being female the latter would get the nod every time.

Interestingly most of the women I work with are not actually British, they come from other oil centres around the world so my teams tend to be very diverse with people from West Africa, Iran, Brazil, Russia and far east. What is observable is that in those countries engineering is seen as a prestige subject up their with medicine or law and something to aspire to and not something you are pushed in to. I have a Malaysian engineer who actually wanted to study French literature at uni but her parents said no and enrolled her on a chemical engineering course. She resented the decision as first but is now thankful that she is in a well paid industry that allowed her international travel opportunities including a stint working in Paris where she could indulge in her love of French writing!

So long as there are no gender barriers to women pursuing a career in whatever discipline they desire maybe we should just leave them to it rather then trying to achieve 50/50 parity in every industry?

That said, rather cynically I have noticed it is only when engineers started to command decent salaries that suddenly 'something must be done' to get more women into the profession, nobody gave a shite when we were all paid peanuts to freeze our arses off on muddy construction sites or fabrication yards in the middle of winter

YAB soooooo U!

My DD loves science but as the majority in her GCSE class are male, when she chose her options she got a lot of pisse taking. She almost changed her options, however one of these events and a lot of encouragement from her teacher means she has carried on. If the boys in her class had attended the event it would have had a different 'feel' - the female engineer she spoke to at the event empathised with her and told her she had the same experience this would not have happened with males there.

The only thing I would have been annoyed about was they school should have put on something in areas were men are underrepresented.

YABVU