Men only school workshop

[Littlepaleale]

Sometime lurker and first poster on feminist chat so please be gentle with me.

My reception aged, DD brought a letter home from school today inviting 'Dads and male careers' to a series of technology skills workshops.

I'm outraged and working out how to respond.

Schools should be hypersensitive to promoting STEM subjects and encouraging girls in particular. Am sure there's a well intentioned reason that it's being targeted at men but it's thoughtless, at best, and makes me worry about the other subtle signals the school might be sending girls about what they should be interested in or good at.

I would have made a point and signed up for the course but am not able to make it (mixture of mine and husband's work commitments and looking after the children).

Have sounded out some mum friends in a jokey way and no one else seems to feel the same as me. Why is this?

How do I respond? I'm thinking a brief note to the workshop organiser and the Head. Would love to be able to do it with style and humour!

Interested in your thoughts

I am not concerned about the career ambitions of make uo blogger , dancer and childcare worker because they are stereo typically female.

I am concerned because these girls plan to do no post school education and go into jobs that offer poor pay and few prospects .

No one who is not good at dancing aged 16 will suddely make a living out of it once she leaves school. Both my sister and a close friend are professional dancers - they strugle to make end meets and are stil in rented flats ( can't afford to buy ) in their 40s.

Make up blogger - what proportion of girls who want to do this will end up making millions on you tube and what proportion will end up being behind a counter in boots ?

Child care worker - poorly paid and insecure . Where I live it's paid minimum wage even for those who are qualified .

No one woudl think these were great ambitions for boys who are capable of getting good A levels and going to college / university / into a good job . But they are fine because they are " just girls ".

If they are such great jobs, why do more boys not go into them ? STEM jobs have good pprospects , pay and job satisfaction and I think we should be encouraging our daughter to consider them , not telling them they are for men / dads / boys .

It annoys me that men have to be encouraged, and women are just expected to support their children's learning.

I don't have a problem if someone chooses to be a make-up blogger because it's what they really want to do. I do have a problem with it, if they decide to do it when what they'd really like to do is be a chemist with Max Factor (or whoever), working on new formulas for lipstick and so on, but choose not to do that, because they think girls don't usually do science, and they don't want to be the only one taking Chem and Physics. And by having Dads doing tech workshops, it's reinforcing the idea that girls don't really do science or technology.

I sometimes wish my grandmother were still alive, to ask what she thought of things like this; she read maths at Cambridge (a couple of decades before women were awarded full degrees there), and went on to teach maths and physics in a girls' school till she retired in the late '60s. I wonder if she would have felt we have made more progress by now, or if she would have appreciated that things are easier than they were when she was at school and university. (Also, in her day, either as a school girl or a teacher), parents weren't particularly involved at all, I don't think.)

I would definitely complain. I'm much more tech orientated than DH. He struggles with the flipping remote control.

I'd word it along the lines of being concerned that it gives the impression to both boys and girls that tech is a skill for men, not women. With the lack of qualified STEM professionals in UK, we need to encourage all kids who have an aptitude for this to seek a career in this field.

I am not concerned about the career ambitions of make uo blogger , dancer and childcare worker because they are stereo typically female & 5 out of the 6 finalists for the BBC Young Dancer of the Year are boys

Stereotypes are just plain bad; ambition is to be fostered as are gender neutral careers

I'm a massive advocate of male childcare workers despite massive opposition from parents

Every time a picture in a book/character in a TV programme displays a male plumber or doctor and a female librarian or teacher it adds to this and massive work needs to be done to create more equality of aspiration.

Round here agricultural labourer/warehouse operator are I guess the male equivalents of your make-up/dancer/childcare worker & simply by me saying that I am adding into the male/female incongruence that exists

Girls are dancers/boys play football

Primary school teachers are mainly female, secondary maths/science teachers are often male

On the plus side, having a majority of female primary teachers does mean that most early years tech, computing and science is taught by women.

Unless it's at least 2 schools in our local area where they have a dedicated ICT unit/teacher which are exclusively male.

DD's ict teacher is also the music teacher. When he praised DD for her quick excellence at tesselations I commented jokily that it was probably down to the hours she spends on Minecraft - "ooh, what's that, then?"

Sorry, pressed post too soon.

He freely admits he's basically two pages ahead of the class and knows very little about the subject, yet he's also the only male teacher in the school. I do wonder...

In our school the ICT teacher is a woman who apparently is pretty good at almost everything. :)

My company used to recruit music graduates to work in IT. Apparently they have a good aptitude match.