How can I encourage my daughters to consider traditionally male dominated careers?

[meinus]

I've been trying to expose my daughters to career areas that are traditionally male dominant. I wanted to share this video because I like how it simply shows a young woman 'as' an engineer and they liked the fun machine setting: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XppH0LJ7c4E
Has anyone seen any other good videos like this that I could show them?

Long thread, apologies if this was already said. DD pointed out something blindingly obvious about why certain GCSEs or professions are male dominated.

Because those boys aren't doing arts-childcare-hairdressing-catering-etc. The real problem is boys afraid of 'gay' subjects, not girls afraid of STEM.

I'm not sure anyone had said that, but I was thinking somewhat along those lines when pondering the 'why dont girls like physics' .... given that the gcse content isn't all as riveting as it might be, maybe a lot of the boys aren't really all that keen either but go on with it anyway. Either because they like the other options less/peer pressure against other options or because they can see it's enabling for 'male' occupations eg engineering.

Not many boys do Textile design GCSE
not many boys do BTEC childcare
not many boys go to beauty college

c'est la vie

and FWIW : the Judiciary has not exactly covered itself in glory for attitudes towards women this week .....

YeT the most prominent fashion designers & hair dressers tend to be men. I think that's other forces at work, though.

^Those of you who think that stem qualifications are encouraged and there is no peer pressure stopping girls pursuing the academic subjects- why do
you think they don't? particularly in mixed schools?^

I don't think they are encouraged, I know they are. Government policy is to encourage them and this flows down into schools. There is no peer pressure stopping girls pursuing STEM subjects which I guess is what you meant, because of course 'the academic subjects' include MFL, humanities and arts subjects too. Girls do persue STEM subjects, in mixed schools. sometimes because they want to, sometimes because they are forced to.

Poison doing double maths is potentially an easier way to get good grades oh god yes, this is certainly true. Double maths is significantly easier to get good grades in - if you can do maths - than a single essay subject is, even if you are superb at that subject. This is why people doing double maths are expected to do at least 4 A2s.

'you constantly get the impression that being innumerate /unable to understand science is accecpatable- even now you hear flippant remarks from successful people and particualarly women about their inability to do numbers in a way you would never get with say reading (for women anyway)'

That rings very true Fragile.

Indeed, Ragged, gen ed grades count. I think this is as it should be. There is little use to a scientist who can't put a sentence together, as someone else pointed out earlier in the thread.

I meet the parents of lots of my DCs' schoolmates frequently, and we talk about how everyone is doing.

Poisonwoodlife
'these pupils are not idiots and they do have a right to decide what they want to do with their lives in the short and long term provided they get sound advice'
They need the sound advice because?
There are a lot of idiots like the NI children who opt for the path of least resistance.

I am very glad that my DCs and I were educated in systems that 'forced' students to take a broad range of subjects and were thus saved from making short-sighted decisions based on dodgy reasoning. I am also glad that the broad range we were all 'forced' to take included MFLs (as well as Irish in my case). What a tremendous pity that it is really only in 'good' schools that students get realistic advice to keep their options open, to keep up a broad range of subjects that may be challenging. The beauty of a system like the Irish one is that you don't have to go to a 'good' school to find yourself 'forced' to consider a broad range of subjects to keep your options open. Students in a system that involves a broad range of subjects are not going to fall prey to the temptation to take the easy road or bow to any (allegedly) widespread pressure to abandon arts and humanities either.

Economics as an academic discipline often renders women invisible; John Locke's ideas applied only to men, and he set the tone. Women's contribution in the economic sphere has always been seen as instinctive and moral while men's contribution has been seen as rational and a response to measurable imperatives. There is a bit of a whiff of the genderising of the moral in comments about the necessity of literature and the arts here on this thread too, imo. Why is it women who are left filling in the important arts and humanities details, providing the cultural wallpaper so to speak while men build the walls, women doing the meal planning and the washing and the mountains of ironing and the arranging of everyone's social calendar and children's activities and choosing the colour of the bedroom curtains while men are poking sausages around a BBQ or golfing, aka networking, or picking up bits of significant gossip on weekends?

The issue with women's position in every career is work/life balance. This should be an issue for men. In fact, work/life balance is only an issue for women because it is not an issue for men, who have got away with forging ahead regardless of their personal circumstances, or who have learned to accept that their lot in life is to lead downtrodden lives under piss poor managers (I agree 100% with 'For most occupations, long hours==poor management'.)

The fact that theoretical economics was considered with men in mind and small details like the fact that the DCs' high school AP econ classroom was festooned with portraits of bearded gentlemen from the last 300 years (apparently the leading lights of economics were fond of facial hair) didn't put any of my DDs off it, so far anyway. Nor does the strong odour of gendered analysis put off the hundreds of women of SE and S Asian descent who choose American STEM degrees and don't drop out. I think positive discrimination in favour of girls in science, and the celebration of incidents like a girl dissecting a fish are all well and good, but ultimately they only serve to highlight how unthinkable the concept of girls in STEM really is in certain cultures. 'Each individual should be valued for what THEY want to do without reference to their race or sexuality or gender' this is why I think it is not really such a good idea to make a heroine out of a girl who has dissected a fish. I think it's far better in the long run to proceed as if this is not unusual. I think you will find that it is not necessarily highly qualified boys from abroad who are edging out British students from Oxbridge STEM degrees it is girls from nose to the grindstone cultures, whose gender culture sees no contradiction between being female and working hard at maths.

The big divide among girls is not those who go to single sex vs mixed sex schools. The socio economic divide and the related information divide are crucial. On one side are girls (and boys) for whom the phrase 'you can do anything you want' is true (except we rarely really mean it. What we mean is 'you can take the good advice that is offered and do well for yourself'.) On the other side it is just a cruel joke, or else it is taken literally and students, being idiots and without proper guidance, do anything they want. Students at good schools whether mixed or single sex, or from MC communities, tend to get good advice from parents and teachers, and those at poor schools tend to be left to grapple for the rest of their lives with the consequences of choosing Tourism instead of a decent mix of challenging academic subjects. There are a lot of students who could benefit from simply not having mickey mouse subjects to choose from and being 'forced' instead to do subjects they don't see the point of at an age when they are not allowed to use their judgement to vote.

*girls will succeed if they have it reinforced from a young age that they can do whatever they like
Apparently that does not apply to maths, a subject in which only a chosen few can succeed because they have Special Brains, or because maths is a subject that only reveals itself to an elite (which is the same thing).

Why are we discussing the quality of physics teaching but ignoring the role of teaching in maths, coming out instead with incomprehensible statements like 'Double maths is significantly easier to get good grades in - if you can do maths - than a single essay subject is'?

(And I didn't say I ate the creme eggs in the US, just that they are available.)

Well then you need to either brush up your reading comprehension skills, your maths skills (you seem to think maths is hard work. At school level it really isn't ) or your knowledge of the education system most of us are talking about. There is a reason why double maths students have to do 4 A2s - because it's generally accepted that double maths is an easier option than say english and history. However there is a reason why people who aren't getting A* at GCSE are discouraged from doing double maths at AS - it's a massive 'step up' and many A grade students (especially the ones who achieved that A by 'hard work') won't be able to make that step up. Nothing to do with sex (gender is a social construct) everything to do with the thing you refuse to believe in, which is natural ability. Two maths graduates in this thread have stressed this does exist in maths yet you refuse to believe them. Neither of us has suggested that maths ability lies only with boys, incidentally. I certainly don't think it does. I do agree that in days of yore talented female mathematicians might well have been discouraged from pursuing their talent - but not today.

Let me be very clear - for the hard of reading - if I felt girls were being steered away from STEM because of 'lady brain' I'd be on the barricades myself. There's no such thing as lady brain and everyone should be encouraged to follow the path that best suits them. But girls are not being steered away from STEM. Quite the reverse. Girls and boys - in equal measure - are being steered firmly towards STEM, STEM subject are now seen not so much as primus inter pares but just primus. Schools with low numbers of physics students (of either sex) are frowned at, schools with high numbers of physics students are given awards, and if their arts Ed or humanities are a bit rubbish nobody cares any more.

People in this thread have talked about girls being steered away from the arts and humanities and into STEM because this thread is about girls. But that doesn't mean that the people in this thread think that only girls should be doing arts or humanities and that boys should be left to plough the STEM furrow in splendid isolation.

incomprehensible statements like 'Double maths is significantly easier to get good grades in - if you can do maths - than a single essay subject is'?

It's perfectly comprehensible to anyone who's done it.

There are issues with maths teaching. One affects girls - it's that there are still too many primary teachers (which is a predominantly female occupation here) who aren't confident with maths, and there are also far too many mothers who are likewise (I do hope that when mothers who were themselves failed by the prevailing system come on MN for maths help and usually generate enthusiastic responses, they make sure their kids know that this is a bunch of ordinary women doing and enjoying maths!). Getting out of this pernicious false mindset that 'girls cant do maths' isn't going to happen by government decree. The others affect all kids. One is that there aren't enough good maths teachers (partly because not enough women currently do maths).

There is no 'girls can't do maths' mindset at either my DDs' school or my DS's school - in both schools the girls are seen as the ones who are better at maths. However it was different for DD2 at primary school where the 'maths soecialist' (he was truly rubbish) was a man and clearly favoured two boys (with lower attainment) over her (he would frequently make comments about dancing and music to her, in a derogatory way, when she got something right in maths and one of the boys didn't (this was the L6 table, only 3 kids on it). I'm fairly sure he thought girls can't do maths and I'm fairly sure he was not happy that the only parent with a maths degree was me (he doesn't have a maths degree). At secondary school though all the kids are given parity of esteem and there is no sex bias in the teaching.

There are a lot of great teachers out there, but you're right there are still some dreadful ones, I don't think dreadfulness is predicated on sex though, it just happens that of all the maths teachers my kids have had the worst two have been men, but one of the best ones was a man too. I don't think women automatically make better or worse teachers either of maths, or any other subject, than men. And I don't think that women automatically make better teachers 'of girls' than men (although some girls and some boys respond better to some women teachers).

I get quite twitchy when people start saying 'women are better at x' because it's usally a precursor to 'and they are worse at y' and it often turns out that y is the thing you'd want to be better at, given a choice. Natural talent definitely exists. Preference definitely exists. Neither are predicated on sex.

My DD was fortunate that there was no maths bias in either of her schools.
My comment about the scarcity of good maths teachers in relation to women was unclear - simply that because a lower proportion of women go on to do maths degrees than men, the pool of mathematicians who want to teach is lower than it should be. Same thing for physics I expect. And of course in terms of available role models it presumably helps to have a mix of male and female teachers.

It did occur to me that in the context of the school - which is where our kids spend so much of their lives - while the teaching staff is usually reasonably balanced at secondary, and the leadership teams are becoming moreso than in the past, the gender divide of occupations still tends to be entrenched in other roles. I've never seen male secretarial staff, and I don't think I've come across any female lab/tech/computing technicians (I'm sure some must exist, but IME rare - which is odd as these jobs probably got relatively family-friendly hours).

When my DD was doing 11+ and I was dusting off rusty Arithmetic skills to help her I was sat at a dinner table with amongst others, two Accountants, a Head of Equity Trading for a global bank and an Operations Head for a global bank. I asked them 7*8. Nobody could answer for at least 5 minutes. We then went on to do some basic and not so basic problems that appeared on 11+ papers, again took a while with much hilarity . 11+ Maths is not hard, it just isn't necessarily instantly retrievable, but I am sure every Primary School teacher can retrieve it. The curriculum and attainment targets are tightly proscribed, more than ever before pupils are given the tools to do Maths as well as being expected to rote learn, and time is set aside in the curriculum for it. Of course some pupils will not learn literacy and numeracy skills because they do not have the support at home etc etc. and of course individual teachers can be arses, sadly that happens but to say that children are not being given basic Maths skills in Primary Schools is rubbish, what you see in the mumsnet threads is mothers coming to it fresh and realising they have forgotten it, and to a lesser extent having been taught things like carrying differently. It''s like riding a bike, a couple of hours with a book and you are remembering it all.

I don't especially like the SATs culture especially in Literacy but what it demonstrates is the vast majority come out of Primary school with better basic numeracy skills than ever before, it does not need Maths grads to teach percentages, fractions, how to calculate the area and perimeter of a football field and at it's hardest some basic algebra. It's not rocket science or even calculus.

the vast majority come out of Primary school with better basic numeracy skills than ever before
This I agree with (especially having a child in Y7 right now)

it does not need Maths grads to teach percentages, fractions, how to calculate the area and perimeter of a football field and at it's hardest some basic algebra

This bit though, while it should be true, I wonder if actually it is. Because there must be some reason why kids are leaving primary school with much higher levels of maths attainment than in our day, but GCSE maths and A level maths and further maths are pitched so much lower than O level and A level were in the days of black and white telly. The emphasis on function maths can't be the only reason. I suspect that for some people (sex bias free, it is affecting boys and girls) the teaching they get at crucial stages is limiting them for later on. Others can clearly cope (again, sex bias free) so the finger of suspicion does seem to point at either the teachers or the methods of teaching that are being enforced.

How about you ask them what they want to do for a living?

The Maths taught in Primary Schools is not rocket Science, or even calculus, you do not have to be a Maths grad to teach times tables, percentages, calculating the area of a football pitch, and at its hardest some basic algebra and logic problems. The curriculum and attainment targets are tightly proscribed, and more than ever children are being given the tools to get to answers logically rather than through rote learning. I am no great fan of the SATs culture but it does show that children are coming out of Primaries with better numeracy skills than ever before, especially those at the average and above. This assumption it is all going wrong in Primaries just is not true. When I was helping my DD with 11+ I was one of those mothers struggling with rusty skills, it wasn't that I didn't use Maths everyday in my work, it was just that I hadn't used a times table, worked out a percentage etc. for a very long time. I asked a dinner party table to give me the answer to 7*8, it took them all at least 5 minutes using fingers and they included a couple of Accountants and the Head of Equity Trading for a global bank.

And you are more likely to see Mary Anning, Mary Seacole or Grace Darling on the walls of a Primary classroom these days, it infuriates Gove.

To say it is all going wrong in Primary is rubbish.

Sorry though my iPad had swallowed the post!

Do you not think though that the lower standard of GCSE versus O level is about inclusivity? Far fewer people gained Maths O level, or even Maths O level and CSE. The O level curriculum was always aimed at what now would be regarded as medium to high attainers. teaching is now aimed at getting more to a certain basic standard. I think it is as much political as to do with standards of teaching, and about to revert to the former target. However I do think that the emphasis on attainment targets etc is interfering with the way Maths is taught. I was lucky to have a Maths teacher who taught us logic first and all the actual Algebra, trigonometry etc always came back to the underlying logic. I may never have been taught how to calculate the advanced equations of a curve but when I needed to I could work it out for myself because of that brilliant grounding. My girls achieved A*s as much because of endlessly practising. Too much emphasis on the outcome can reduce the quality of the process.

But none of this is gendered.

it may be easier to get double a at maths than to get two a's in english history (bizarrely- my combination of a levels) but it is a lot easier to fail as well. At school level you tend to get marks for results in maths rather than the interim steps/style etc- or indeed it is more binary.
I wouldn't expect anyone who didn't walk an a* at GCSE maths to get an A at a level - although my understanding is taht the levels required to get top grades have been lowered so that the jump/gap occurs later.

gently - i meant pursuing the academic STEM subjects (as opposed to STEM careers)- rather than academic subjects in general- so would be interseted in views as to why the STEM vs other academics split is different for girls in mixed v state schools

on the long hours thing- its tricky- although I love the idea that women are more efficinet than men in doing things in a shorter time- the fact is that you get efficient people working long hours too-someon working 13 hours is better than someone working 10 on balance- as long as they are happy and not tired!
I worked longer hours (and had more sleep)before children and was hence more productive than i am now - if i am brilliant for 10 hours a day now I was brilliant for 13 before..
i work in an industry that works accross time zones so out of 9-5 work is essential, face-time can be overrated but is still important. if no-one did the long hours /antisocial stuff it would be great for those of us who can't - but i do think the business would be less efficient. whetehr efficiency is the only desirable outcome is a different question
I think instead the cultural differences between men and women cause more issues- ability is seen as being demonstarted by confidence- not necessarily the case and then traits that indicate confidence are more synomonous with male (and white/anglosaxon) traits. It is harder to succeed when to succeed you need to go against your natural tendencies. Business support diversity but in part this is undermined by then rewarding only traditional behaviour

One thing though, whilst I do not think past changes to teaching and curriculum were of particular effect on gender difference. Future ones will.

Interesting that Math should have highlighted the importance of History in conveying role models. Gove wants all the current positive role models for all but the powerful white men erased from the curriculum, particularly and specifically Mary Seacole. Hopefully good History teachers will subvert that by highlighting how many of those men were mad and /or gay, eg Gordon. Perhaps he'll get his favourite historian Niall Ferguson to colour in the shades of grey

Fragile I do not think you could be more misguided on the hours question. If you work in banking then perhaps your career is at an earlier stage than my peers. What seemed exciting, rewarding and adrenalin boosting at 30 and maybe even 40 turns into the road to a coffin with many regrets about lost time spent with family at 50. And you are not as brilliant in the 5 hours that follow a basicc working day, it is a law of diminishing returns. Judgement and attention to detail suffer. Some very senior bankers I know have had the courage to get in their cars at 5 and go home, or even 3 if they were in early to talk to Asia, or go in at 11 if they have to talk to New York . They get to do one end of the school run and they certainly are no less effective. It is cultural, nothing to do with organisational effectiveness.

o say it is all going wrong in Primary is rubbish.
Yes, it is. However, what can 'go wrong' for some girls in primary is more subtle than the content of the curriculum or the teacher's actual ability to deliver it. It's that insidious thing where a teacher (who will probably be female) may - with the best of intentions - do what many parents also do, which is to tell the child they found it difficult too or that they 'werent good at maths either'.

someon working 13 hours is better than someone working 10 on balance

You might think so, but as far as I know the studies into working hours have shown that this is fallacious. Of course you may get the odd individual with low sleep requirements for whom the job is such fun that they'd rather do it than 'relax' but that tends to be the exception to the rule. The other problem is if you have a long hours culture, you've got nowhere to go in a crisis. Plan your organisation for proper work-life balance, then if there's a crunch once in a while then people can cope. Mature, successful businesses know this. (the company I work for was once a small start up - we were mostly young, single and worked silly hours, didn't take holiday etc. The company and the people grew up, thank goodness!)

I think it's a dreadful disservice to education to misuse History as a vehicle for imparting the socially conscious flavour of the month. If the significant contributors to Economics over the past few centuries were men, then that is just a fact that needs to be sucked up imo, and students need to get on with tackling the econ courses. The reasons for the lack of women or the lack of recognition of women's contribution to the discipline could be teased out in a history course that encourages careful, evidence-based exposition as opposed to one that affords an opportunity to indulge bees in the bonnet of various stripes.

GentlyBenevolent -- Of course gender is a social construct. But the myth of race, and the myth of natural ability in maths are too. Years ago women were considered to have too much cotton wool in their heads to tackle science or vote or drive or have bank accounts of their own, and the Unwashed were considered to have belonged at the bottom of the heap because only the blue bloods were capable of leadership, only white people were capable of enjoying the rights of citizenship, and only straight (white) men could be soldiers. Many people who sincerely believed they got where they were because they had some innate superiority over others were very slow to recognise that that was actually not the case, and it is the same for people claiming that some sort of 'natural mathematical ability' got them ahead of the rest in maths.

I was lucky to have a Maths teacher who taught us logic first and all the actual Algebra, trigonometry etc always came back to the underlying logic. I may never have been taught how to calculate the advanced equations of a curve but when I needed to I could work it out for myself because of that brilliant grounding. My girls achieved A*s as much because of endlessly practising. Too much emphasis on the outcome can reduce the quality of the process.
I agree with much of this as far as the approach to maths teaching goes. I think teachers of maths at primary level need far more education in their subject.
However, I do not understand how you can square your own experience of a teacher who understood what was important in his or her subject, taught logic first and gave you a brilliant grounding adds up to 'natural ability' on your part. The truth of the matter is that on the whole, people who succeed in maths have benefited from great teachers, well thought out curricula, encouraging parents, and a culture that values maths. Or are you trying to say Asian students from Shanghai for instance have some special maths gene?

I suspect that for some people (sex bias free, it is affecting boys and girls) the teaching they get at crucial stages is limiting them for later on. Others can clearly cope (again, sex bias free) so the finger of suspicion does seem to point at either the teachers or the methods of teaching that are being enforced.
I agree with this. One mistake that I see is the emphasis on computational skills at the expense of exploration of concepts and logic, for example, teaching times tables with the focus on getting the answers right for a whole year or even longer instead of focusing directly and explicitly on the properties of multiplication, which is what students should really be taking away from multiplication as they head into algebra via percentages, fractions, etc. In general, the focus on getting sums right distracts students from what is really important in mathematical thinking.

Bathsheban -- How about you ask them what they want to do for a living?
I did and still do. Sometimes as children they would also come up with unsolicited ideas. To all of their plans I would respond very positively, and even with DD3 who would only say what she hated, I used to say 'It's so nice to know your own mind.' But they gradually become aware of financial realities -- how much it costs to run a car, buy a house or pay rent, feed and clothe themselves and any possible children they might have, pay vet bills for a pet, go on holiday, and when they are looking at subjects to choose in secondary education their future educational expenditure comes into it too. So they ask me and their career counsellors in school about income, potential career progression in various professions, years of study and extra qualifications required, difficulty of getting into certain courses and they take all the answers into account. I feel sorry for children who do not have access to the school resources my DCs do, or those whose parents don't steer them in the direction of the counsellors, or who don't know what they don't know and therefore don't ask.

Math Interesting question.

As I have said before I do not know what the balance is between nature and nurture, except that I am sure it is a balance, we are neurodiverse, you are flying in the face of scientific evidence denying that, and you haven't convinced anyone. As I said before I think in models, I am Dyslexic and it is a common trait. it is why the MOD employs Dyslexics rt.com/uk/189580-gchq-dyslexic-spies-recruited/ I responded before to your assumption that Dyslexia etc are disabilities, they aren't, they are differences, actually quite a wide range of differnces under the Specific Learning Difficulties umbrella, that in some specific learning contexts are disabilities but in other contexts are strengths. The logic and patterns of Maths are very appealing to me, but I am hopeless at Arithmetic. I didn't somewhere along the line became Dyslexic because of some teacher or other influence, nor did my brother, father, niece, nephew and daughters, there is clearly some genetics involved.

However the process and methods of learning literacy and numeracy skills in China does have an impact on brain development and especially pictorial memory skills, by a very young age Chinese children will have memorised over 2000 characters, but have no need to acquire knowledge of the concepts of phonics or grammar (tenses come from context). The teaching there is heavily based on rote learning, in Maths too. It is all about model answers and practise, practise, practise. Stand in a Chinese primary School classroom, and I did for a year, not in Shanghai but a developed part of China, and they are reciting, and copying, very little actual teaching goes on. One of the biggest challenges that affects Chinese Students studying in English is developing the memory skills they need when working in the English language. It is why I keep coming back to the fact that education arises from and is relevant to the cultural context.

poisonwood - am in banking and am pretty senior. I just think it is naive to think that working short hours is always possible and someone can always work short hours and be more efficient than other people. I think there is flexibility in when you do those hours and where you do them but not doing them at all doesn't work; that said i am currently working from home and have done the school run both ends today and spoken to ny and asia! I think people have to be realistic. I don't know any senior person who works like you describe on a regular basis every day.
you cando a role in a more flexible manner but it can be frustrating and likely to be slower career wise.

That said I think the long hours aspect is exaggerated to a degree - For me the hours I work in banking (even when childfree) are a lot less than when I worked in practice. I have to be available to a certain degree and responsive but not necessarily working- technology helps. Its not a matter of people working hours such that they are sleep deprived compared to people getting a full night's sleep- it can be simply the difference between 6pm and 7pm.
Everything is exacerbated by long commutes which just reduce the time spent at home without increasing time spent at home.

BUT as i said i really think its the other attitudes that need to be fixed- including the media/willy-waving representation of bankers as working really long hours.
Plus- its not gender so much in banking as class still- the female/male divide is a lot more representiave than the state/private divide

I am not sure that the drop out of women in banking is connected with STEM qulaifications either - i think the level of women entering banking is pretty close to me (it is at mine at analyst level)- so its not the qualifications per se that are the problem here. I think in other fields it is entry level that is biased as well.

I understand the impact mothers can have on girls- but is this a role model issue - enforcing a belief that women can't do maths- rather than any lack of ability to support a daughter (say in doing her maths home work) as this would presumably affect sons as well?

So how do you account for the fact that even those ethnic Chinese students from second or third generation SE Asian families who have not learned Chinese characters are more likely to do well at maths than other ethnic groups?

Asian students tend to outstrip students from other ethnic groups in reading as well as maths in the US.