rayshul wrote:Rather liked this article:
I’ve seen so much energy spent on telling girls that “they can do it, too!â€, but I worry what message this is really sending. It seems to remind you that you belong to a minority, which is its own sort of reinforcement, much in the same way I was perpetuating gender bias as a kid. But there are studies that show when you present kids just with life as if it were normally always this way they simply accept it as such.
Makes a nice argument against identity politics in a way I wish I'd done first.
Oh ya, I've thought quite a bit about this. Seems to me that messages like "Girls can do [x]!" may plant seeds of doubt for girls about whether or not they themselves really can do [x].
I hear this a fair amount at math competitions, including one last month where the speaker invited to fill time after the test-taking & before the awards blathered on about how
great it was to see so many girls there (indeed, about half were girls) and how girls really
can be good at math and can go on to become engineers etc. I was embarrassed for him and a little angry. My guess is that most of the girls there hadn't been feeling out of place or outclassed, and of course half the kids there were ignored in his speech - so much for "motivational". Whereas welcoming & cheering on ALL the kids there, and celebrating their enthusiasm for math & their accomplishments, etc, would have seemed more appropriate and IMO probably more effective. I've also noticed that most of the math coaches at elementary schools in this area seem to be women, so certainly the kids have role models at that level for women who are enthusiastic about math and hopefully share that enthusiasm with ALL the kids they teach & coach. (At middle school & senior high school levels, the coaches do seem to be mostly men.)
I also cringe at all the talk about how "you don't have to be scared of math!" - what if it hadn't actually occurred to the person - probably more likely female than male - to be
scared of math, they just saw it at dry & difficult or something. But that example focuses more on messages
about math, whereas your focus is, appropriately, messages
to people who are members of a sub-group assumed to perform less well, and need encouragement, in some specific area.