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?

My DH is an engineer and the higher he has climbed the corporate ladder the more his work is negotiating with contractors, humouring bosses and supporting younger staff.

The engineering has come second.

So people skills are vital.

FSV at 'high level'?

The existence of 'natural disability' doesn't mean there is some corresponding 'natural ability'. It just demonstrates that there are exceptions (the tone deaf, the dyspraxic, people who are both tone deaf and dyspraxic, poor souls) but they prove the rule. There is no 'and so on' to it.

Girls are especially ill-served by the myth of natural ability and 'interest' arising in a vacuum, and the related lack of faith in hard work. They are very vulnerable to the myth that STEM subjects are for spotty, swotty boys/ people with no emotional intelligence/ people who can't string a sentence together -- who would want to be associated with a group like that?

In an American high school your coursework and exams and contribution in class count towards your Grade Point Average, which along with your ACT and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores go towards completing the academic profile you submit to universities when applying. So not only are students dragged kicking and screaming (lol) through subjects they don't want to do, they have to work at them with a consistently high degree of engagement all year round for four years. Circumstances in your average American high school and Irish secondary school are hardly what anyone would call 'ideal'. But students and teachers manage to cover the courses. Students get offers of university places commensurate with the discipline and effort they have demonstrated. Of course not everyone is going to work as hard as they should or as consistently. This is how the sheep and the goats are separated.

US degrees take four years. Courses are all examined. At the end of your four years you will have a GPA to show for your four years, just as in high school. High GPAs qualify you for different grades of honours. From graduation you enter the world of graduate employment or grad school -- law school, medical school, or off to become a vet or to do a masters in education, etc. DD1 has a friend who did a degree in Chinese who is now in medical school. DS with his degree in biology is considering law school. An individual with a STEM degree can consider doing law because he has taken enough courses that require writing at university level to make law a solid possibility. An individual who has a degree in a language has taken enough science courses to enable her to pass the MCAT and look forward to a career as a cardiologist. So yes, versatile, literate and numerate, and no need for a at 'high level'.

It is not enough for one parent to model non-stereotyped behaviour when society (eg newspapers) show so many stereotypes.

No you do not have to do an 'associated degree' before heading to law school or med school/veterinary school, etc. You just need to prove you graduated with a bachelors degree. It doesn't matter what that degree is in. A BMus has as much chance as someone with an English Lit or Greek or Physics or Fine Arts degree when it comes to getting into law school. I know American lawyers with bachelors in those subjects. They all attended very good law schools.

Oh yeah, dyscalculia gets added to tone deafness and dyspraxia...
These are very obvious factors that would limit someone from achievement through hard work.

Perhaps I should have said 'very obvious limitations apart' hard work will get you where you want to be?

Mathsanxiety this is the same fallacy that says everyone can be taught to sing, well yes they can, they can be given the tools to make the best of what talent they have but never to the same standard as someone who has the DNA bestowed tone, feeling, timing, and all the other qualities to make a singer both a pleasure to listen to and gives them the pleasure of using their talent, and the confidence and motivation (all other things being equal) to succeed.

I completely agree that Maths should be continued longer as part of a rounded education and that there should not be gendered expectations of talents, but to suggest that everyone could succeed to the extent that someone who is particularly talented in the areas that make a good Mathematician is just not true. It is not even as if Mathematicians all have a standard skill set, they specialise, let alone the rest of the population.

What I have seen in my DDs very selective school is a trend in just the last four years for students to be pushed into doing Stem courses when their talents would have enabled them to have done better in other subjects. It is a girls' school with a very strong record in Stem subjects. It certainly gave my DD the inspiration and confidence to follow a career in Science. However the fact remains that a girl who would have got As and A*s in English, History or other respected subjects, but ends up with Bs in the mix of STEM subjects because she finds them hard, and eg Chemistry can trip up even those with the talent and motivation, I have known Med students fall at that hurdle, is not going to get a place on as prestigious a course and university as she would otherwise. I know one girl currently spending a year off working in research to try and up her attractiveness to any decent course but it is backfiring, because it really isn't where her talent lies, and they are telling her that. We are in danger of replacing gendered expectations with cultural expectations (and it is strong amongst particular cultures) which are equally damaging to children and society.

To deny we are all different with different talents to offer society is to go against all the principles that underpin the organisational strategies used by successful businesses ie to make sure their employees are selected, developed and enabled to contribute to an organisation according to their talents, skills, experience and personal qualities, the same is true of society.

And I know that at a top liberal arts college in the US, Wesleyan, they have had to relax the first semester requirement to pass a Maths module, or reapply, because it was tripping up good students.

And be clear, I am talking about a school where the hard work is a given.

Ok, "associated degree" - i.e. a bloody degree.
Which you don't need here in the UK to do law, or dentistry, or veterinary science or medicine. Just a good set of exam results. Which was the point I was making and which you ignored

I know loads of British lawyers who all attended very good law faculties at UK universities - so what? And guess what - most of them only did maths because they had to in order to get into university and also dropped science after 2nd year at school because they preferred other subjects.

No you do not have to do an 'associated degree' before heading to law school or med school/veterinary school, etc. You just need to prove you graduated with a bachelors degree. It doesn't matter what that degree is in.

But you also need a lot of money and/or to take out a lot of student loans, which you will then spend much of your professional career paying back - 5 years of medicine is rather more efficient than undergraduate plus med school. And in practice med school is so competitive that you don't just need to prove you have a bachelors, you need a lot more.

Graduate entry to medicine and law is possible in the UK too, albeit very competitive. I have known quite a few STEM students go on to law, many of whom specialise in topics partly related to their STEM background such as intellectual property or maritime law. Note also that patent agents are almost always recruited from STEM graduates.

By the way if you want to work in academia an enormous disadvantage of the US system is that you don't get the same depth at undergraduate. The first two years of maths/physics graduate school cover what is mostly undergraduate material for European science students.

Agreed, Cauchy. US degrees go for breadth, UK ones for depth.
Both have their merits.

Mathsanxiety you also show a basic misunderstanding of Specific Learning Difficulties and other neurological differences like Autism that are commonly classes as disabilities for the purpose of supporting students through an education system and society that is designed around the needs of a group whose neurological function is characterised as "neurotypical" . In reality nobody is neurotypical, it is just some traits such as good memory skills enable people to do better within traditional educational systems, and with certain teaching methods. It isn't that dyslexics can't learn literacy skills it is just that with traditional teaching methods they have to work harder than most to learn. With the right teaching methods they can be enabled. Plenty of very high achieving Scientists struggled through a traditional education, some are diagnosed dyslexia.yale.edu/greider.html, some you could extrapolate from what they say about their lives. Were the educational environment more geared to the needs of people who do not have these traits, for instance as the MOD does to capitalise on the strengths of their Dyslexic and Autistic staff in it's intelligence service rt.com/uk/189580-gchq-dyslexic-spies-recruited/ then perhaps we would be classing those who rely to a greater extent on specific memory skills to learn as disabled.

We really are all different.

This maybe quite different to what you asked for, but I think it important.

As well as encourage the interest in the first place we need to teach them that being good is more important for a girl than a boy sometimes.
I know that may sexist but its realism.
In some industries the girl is chosen because she looks good, is pretty etc.
They need to know that at least if this is the case they are just as good if not better than the boys, and going for the pretty girls is just an aside.
Obviously, I refer to the entertainment and music industry, but some jobs and roles are very male dominated.
I have taught my dd not to be the token girl and if she is make sure she's bloody good at her job.

Mathsanxiety it is rather fortunate that parents past and present have not followed your direction or DCs have gone their own way otherwise we would be living in a very one dimensional monochrome world with little in the way of entertainment except calculating our pensions .

You have to spend a lot to do your undergrad degree too, but as demonstrated earlier, STEM grads make rather a lot in the US. It won't take my niece the best part of her working years to pay off the loans she took out to attend university, making $80K annually. exH paid off his law school loans within six years of graduation and he was about in the middle of the salary range for newly minted lawyers. DD1 was able to work part time as an undergrad and paid off one of her loans before she graduated. She is already half way to paying off the rest, two and a half years post graduation. DD1's friend who is now in medical school will be paying both medical school loans and malpractice insurance and will still be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle.

People with crappy degrees from unselective universities sometimes end up with horrible debt. Those people should probably not have gone to university and should certainly not have taken out loans to do so.

There are a good few Wesleyan universities. Some are better than others. The highly selective Wesleyan that is claimed to have relaxed its math standards will presently be a far less selective liberal arts college if your claim is true. Smart people in the US do not shell out large amounts of money on second rate universities unless money is no object, or risk taking out large loans to attend places whose student body can't hack mathematics.

Even when it comes to the really good UK universities and the traditional career tracks of grads in the humanities, there is a lot that is amiss imo. A niece of a friend of mine gave up most STEM subjects after GCSEs and read classics at Oxford. Despite knowing nothing of finance and economics, and having a very basic level of maths under her belt that may or may not include a rudimentary grasp of statistics, she works in the Treasury.

You really can't decry the lack of ability of STEM grads to put a sentence together and at the same time tout the alleged depth of UK degrees as a plus. A graduate as a prospective employee or entrepreneur is only as good as his or her ability to work well and communicate well with others.

As for the breadth vs depth argument -- neither are much in evidence in the Sheffield economics department. Sheffield is not the only university where students can get a degree in economics without much maths or ability to use information acquired over the course of previous years of study. UK degrees apart from those at a scattering of top universities that have high thresholds to entry are notorious for the extent of micro specialisation within degrees. My Dsis worked with UK grads who had degrees in geology and found their scant knowledge of many geological periods rendered them only slightly more useful professionally than the office receptionist.

I think this statement from Cauchy directly contradicts what is alleged about the superiority of British vs US degrees:
'In an ideal world economics would require maths and further maths A Level. So would maths, physics and engineering. In reality such requirements exclude too many students so can only be imposed by the top selective universities. At a typical RG only 50% of the students studying maths will have a full further maths A level, for example. Not insisting on maths A level qualifications does not in itself mean that the maths contents of the degrees is low, although obviously places like Cambridge which take students with FM can go a lot faster at the beginning'
It's not just at the beginning that Oxbridge outstrips lesser places. I think the Sheffield example shows how low entry requirements in maths directly impact the calibre of students taking the course and the quality of the degree itself.

We are not so different that there are 'maths' people and 'humanities' people and an 'interest' or 'ability' that is shown at an impressionable age in a highly gendered society is all that we should use to indicate what our 'type' is. Girls in particular have a very hard time discerning their real interests in this society that is awash with gendered expectations and that rewards those girls who 'choose' or 'have an interest in' or an 'ability' in history or Latin or English or even biology as opposed to computer science or applied maths or physics or finance. I am not talking about everyone becoming a mathematician here, just that everyone should be required to do a broad curriculum that includes maths to calculus level and lab sciences. We cannot know what our real strengths are or where our real interests lie until we have been exposed to expectations that we will work hard across the board.

Singing and maths are completely different. One requires a larynx with certain qualities and the other requires only a brain, a sympathetic environment and good teachers. The fact that different groups in different environments and cultures can do very well at maths is amply demonstrated by PISA scores. Of course we are all different to some extent, but culture overrides individual differences, encourages certain preferences, and rewards certain choices or priorities. There is no reason apart from home cultural environment for English-speaking south or south east Asian students who have gone to high school in the US to be 'naturally' better or more 'suited' to STEM degrees than students of caucasian origin, but girls with those ethnic backgrounds tend to apply for STEM degree courses in higher numbers and don't drop out once admitted. And even though they would be described by some here as 'STEM people' they have to do core course requirements in literature, humanities, etc., or forget about graduating -- and they graduate.

If you make it impossible to avoid either STEM subjects or arts/ humanities, people tend to get over themselves and just do it. In the process many learn the benefits of hard work. You really don't have to appreciate your university subjects so much that you leap out of bed every morning at the crack of dawn just itching to get to the chemistry or language lab. You just have to place before students the requirement to work in a variety of disciplines for their own good, the notion that a really good education demands firing on all cylinders, and the reward of competitive salaries or admission to excellent postgrad programmes upon graduation and students will apply in droves.

Again we see from Summerends the myth that you have to be one thing or the other, accompanied by the pernicious implication that STEM students are dull, that STEM subjects are done by people with boring brains and that only non STEM people can liven up this world of ours, and also that there is something amiss with wanting to earn and use larger salaries/something virtuous about earning less -- dangerous notions that tend to put girls completely off STEM subjects and keep them happy with making far less money than they could be making in professions that are traditionally male.

The comparison of uk and us education may be interesting, but in the context of this thread, I think the outcomes in terms of the percentages of girls who go on to various careers esp STEM are broadly similar. This suggests that the reasons for, and solutions to, the under representation of women may lie elsewhere. L

I was in a traditionally male dominated field in my early career. I benefitted from being female and was promoted well. It still had a people side or I would have been bored. I have noticed female friends who are scientifically able still do not find it necessarily interesting without a people element. As I got older I found myself having to prove myself more and more. My more mumsy appearance didn't fit with my role anymore. It was time consuming to continually prove myself. I knew I was good but my face didn't fit.

Unfortunately in the UK many Stem jobs are very underpaid.You can earn a lot of money overseas.Does that fit with a family and children?
Dh is very senior in engineering working for an overseas company.He does not recommend going into engineering in the UK.Salaries are low ( in relative terms) engineering is not understood or respected in the UK.In for example Germany and many parts of Europe it is totally the reverse.
I also don't understand where all the money is going to come from for all these fantastic Stem salaries in the UK.Given that UK salaries are notoriously low.

I totally avoid being judged on appearance now by working from home (fortunately I don't fall into the 'people person' female stereotype).

It is the most selective Wesleyan. This thread is getting into a weird furrrough. On all measures including employability the best UK universities stand up remarkably well on the world stage compared to the best universities elsewhere, especially considering the population and funding issues. The USA and Ireland are just two of the world's education systems, they have their strengths and weaknesses, but above all arise from and work within their own cultures. It is crazy for instance to start quoting salaries of Harvard graduates when Harvard selects from a much bigger pool, and at the same time is a powerful engine in the US's more explicit networking culture. Imagine interviews with alumnae being part of the selection process here. The PISA favourites, the Finnish and Chinese systems arise and work within their cultures which could not be more different. And the UK system arises and works within ours.

None of those systems in my experience as an expat treats its students as commodities to be crammed with Stem skills, in the USA you get to chose from a wider variety of courses at school and university but you pay in the depth of what you learn, and certainly US friends who have taught in both systems say that the critical thinking skills taught in UK schools and universities are far superior to the US.

In the past UK courses have been too narrow, the rigid divides between disciplines are artificial but that is changing too and the breadth of modules available to Science and Humanities students widening. For my DDs humanities course for instance a language, and being able to read core texts and academic journals in the native language is compulsory. Specialist universities like SOAS (not a Maths department in sight) have a very high proportion of US graduate students amongst a high proportion of overseas students because they cannot access the same level of specialist modules, or the concentration of specialist academics in the US (and they may be moving on to amass credits around the globe to compensate).

And above all, whether it is the US or UK or Finland and certainly in China profound gender issues exist, no sign of explicit or implicit, apparent if you scratch the surface, patriarchy giving up just yet.

So to return to OP surely the priority is to keep their eyes open to all the possibilities (and obviously for most they are not global) and give them the skills and confidence to determine their own direction.

Interviews with alumni count for very little of the final decision in most universities. DD1 does interviews for her alma mater. In the case of her particular school the interviewers are supposed to identify applicants who have a long list of Ivy League and equivalent schools they are applying to indiscriminately and have put no thought into what exactly it is that the particular school offers or how it might suit them as individuals.

I knew a lot of UK students in university, and know a lot of US students now. I would disagree with your friends' assessment as to the critical skills of the respective student bodies.

SOAS is very much a niche school offering immense expertise in African and Asian studies, and sells itself as such. DD2 is considering it for her year abroad as she is at a US school that functions as a similar pipeline into certain careers, and actually many faculty members in each place have past experience in both institutions. What SOAS offers dovetails well with her degree. Grad students would be seeking to add an attractive feather to their cap, just as DD2 would be, in order to enhance their chances of employment either in government service or in business or banking or even in military or a security/defence service. Some might be en route to an academic career.

Any Americans going there or to similar programmes for postgrad study would have graduated from leading universities and would thus already be pretty numerate. Postgrad programmes tend not to feature maths unless it's directly related to the course content. Same goes for law schools.

(It won't be the most selective Wesleyan for long...)

Canny -- a good few friends of mine in school in Ireland had fathers who were engineers and spent several years working in the ME, with families in tow. It seemed perfectly acceptable for men to uproot wives and children, rent their homes out, send children to expat schools in SA, and send older children back to Ireland to live with relatives while attending secondary school, or to boarding school. It seems to me the assumption of wives following husbands came about because the wives were all sahms or had jobs as opposed to well paying careers. I wonder would the situation be reversed if women were able to earn the sort of money their husbands make. (I assume the option of working as engineers in Saudi Arabia would be out for women though.)

Bottom line: encourage all your DC to fulfill their potential in whatever way they can.
Science is not the be all.
The world needs people with a wide variety of skills.
Consider the IB if you think the English system has too narrow a focus.

OP I haven't RTWT but my story is that I was considered a talented musician throughout my secondary years, found it very easy, always got distinctions in my exams, loved and excelled in everything I did musically.

Was a good general allrounder everywhere else.

My engineer father 'encouraged' a 'proper' serious career which I did, STEM degree, worked in a male dominated world, earned lots of money, etc,. etc..

Do you know what - I wish I had done a music degree, even now (I sort of gave music up when I went to Uni, recently started again). That is probably the one thing I would change in my life. I am fine with it, not scarred for life, just wish I could have done what I wanted.

DH has a physics masters - we will both embrace whatever DD chooses to do with her life.