lastyearsfad:

I got into another argument about CS programs and women today - I think a relatively unexplored aspect of getting women into STEM majors/careers is the intensity of the programs at colleges.

I find it absolutely fucking stupid that I refused to study CS in college - I feel like I am a giant neon sign advertising how badly broken the system is, if I am so successful at work and whatever, that I didn’t actually get a CS degree.

I think there’s just more cultural pressure for women to have a life and be more well rounded - it was important to me to have a boyfriend, to have friends, to have hobbies - which basically led me to believe that doing one of those intensive programs was a non-option.   A lifestyle choice I couldn’t reasonably make and still be ‘whole’.]

Obviously the social pressure for women is worse when it comes to this, but as a STEM dropout myself, I think it’s kind of bullshit that STEM programs require this choice of anyone, especially at a time (first couple years of college) when most kids are really branching out and discovering who they are as people for the first time.

It’s short-sighted and bad for the sciences. It selects for one kind of personality and one kind of thinker, and the male-dominated culture of these fields has a lot to do with it. I think it has roots in a kind of a macho hazing-related “we went through hell to acquire our knowledge and position, and so should you” kind of mentality that doesn’t have much to do with achieving the best educational or professional outcomes, except insofar as it perpetuates itself and selects for people who thrive within it.

I mean, yeah, yeah, these fields require a certain amount of rigor and accomplishment, and you’re going to have work hard at some point to get there, but the whole competition oriented, pile it on, sink-or-swim culture is toxic for both men and women who have any desire to be whole persons and take full advantage of what college has to offer. Basically, the patriarchy sucks for everyone except the small sliver of powerful men running it, as usual.

Also, if I had been given the opportunity to tell my undergrad EE program why I quit, I pretty much would have written this:

In 2005, the National Academy of Engineering concluded that “scattered interventions” had not resulted in widespread change. “Treating the freshman year as a ‘sink or swim’ experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,” it said, “is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.”