I have a two year old and I can tell you fighting against pinky-princess girl culture is a battle. As a parent, it's you vs basically the rest of society that sends a million little cues about what girls are supposed to do. I had this conversation with my daughter the other morning:
Daughter: I want to be a boy when I grow up. Me: Why is that? Daughter: So I can be an astronaut!
Of course, I explained that girls can be astronauts too. And I've never done anything to set her expectations differently. But they just absorb this stuff from the ether of our culture. At her age, she's picked up on the idea that only boys are astronauts, and girls are ballerinas and princesses and shit.
They (i.e., Disney and Viacom) do have princesses-types doing actiony stuff thinking it's the same thing. And encouraging women to lean in.
They don't typically write those females to think like a someone in engineering, exploration, or security, though. Boys watch Batman be Batman, train hard, think ahead, get beat up, but still be heroic. Girls watch, what, the girl from Brave do action hero things and fight with her mom. Or the princesses from Frozen use amazing powers to resolve what end up being relationship issues.
Honestly, though, I suspect it's difficult to get writers for kids' shows that can think like, say, a theoretical physicist. Writers tend to get art or English degrees.
I suspect it's not television or other media, but rather personal role models in their life.
Unfortunately with society as it is now, having a role model who isn't your gender (and also isn't your relative), mentor you is largely untennable.
Why do you assume this is cause rather than effect? I find it hard to imagine we set out to define gender roles, rather than those roles evolving over a long time due to a billion factors.
The economics of our society have changed both in what efforts are expected from whom, and in what options are granted to whom. That changes some of the billion factors weighing on our constructed social order, but there are still those who benefit from retarding the process.
The problem is a certain things have a very high barrier to entry. Getting into such things requires over the natural amounts of persistence and other myriad life skills for which you need a certain level of biological independence(like not having kids for example).
These barrier to entries vary with each profession. They are higher for the cool jobs, like the CS ones. Most of these career type jobs where continued work is required. Taking long breaks, asking for lesser working hours(While having colleagues at office who would be pushing 15-18 hour workdays) and other such things makes you a bad worker even if you were to somehow work hard and gain initial access. Net result is people feel they are better off doing things where their contributions have some meaning than having to compete with 16 hr shift workers against whom you are set up to lose by default.
This is the whole difficulty with the diversity problem. There is a inherent assumption that things be made easier to accomodate minorities of all kids. Whereas doing well in any profession requires the exact opposite. Harder the things, the better you get by doing them. But that also means, people who are not tough enough for the job get filtered out every iteration along the way.
You just come down to the point that you can't make people do, what they are not ready to put over the necessary efforts to make happen.
Well, for the cool CS jobs, yeah, which is maybe 1% of the total. The rest aren't cool—they're brain-meltingly boring, often frustrating, health-destroyingly sedentary, and often (not always) fairly low-status, despite the pay[0]. The way-above-median pay's just about all a CS career's got going for it, for most.
[0] Compare especially the status boost granted by entering either of two full-on professions which, strikingly, kept improving gender balance through the 80s and beyond despite a long history of being dominated by men: law and medicine. Meanwhile, CS/programming started out better, then got worse around the mid 80s, as measured by graduates in relevant majors.
Partly that's because those 1% have to do outreach to get enough workers willing to endure those conditions, and partly it's because those are entire companies filled with passionate people (because everyone who doesn't love the job quickly quits) and they want to share their passion.
Most employers won't. But yet some people pour in a lot of time to make themselves better. That is precisely the whole point.
Its exactly a bit like school. Schools won't force you to put any hours. But people putting in late nighters and burning the midnight oil end up scoring high marks and getting better grades.
How do you suggest we help low scoring students? By telling the better student to study less?
You know what else we are influenced by? Biological traits, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism
Did you think about what if she would have a happier life as a ballerina than an astronaut?
There is also the fact that those who truly want something will go get it despite the headwinds.
Rather peoples inclinations are varied and weak, so a society that discourages women from entering science will find more than half of women who had a weak inclination to science will simply choose the next-equal profession they were inclined to.
How would one go about preventing this from happenning without segregating the child?
You the parent have to go out of your way to make a list of women astronauts, scientists, stateswomen, authors, captains, professors-- everything-- so your daughter grows up in a world women can do anything.
A thing that all of us can do is to get rid of their prejudices for real. We like calling things mysogny and racism and attack, but what they profoundly are is hereditary prejudice which only heals through self-education.
Edit: prejudices are not limited to white males, but we all have them (obviously me too, thus having to do this edit).
I don't know how true this is now, but there's plenty of Soviet propaganda aimed at women telling them how they're an important part of the workforce too. They were certainly specially encouraged to go into "technology" of the time (or industry, as it was more commonly known in Soviet times).
http://russiatrek.org/blog/art/the-image-of-a-woman-in-sovie...
Witness for example how much more of a celebration international women's day is in the ex-Soviet countries than elsewhere.
The pay is not great and a lot of hoops to jump, but the hours are usually flexible. Maybe some women don't feel pressure to be breadwinners, so they can choose a career in science, but men feel that they have to make more money than science ever promises in Russia.
My evidence is anecdotal, but think about it -- Russia recently decriminalized domestic violence, not exactly the hallmark of gender equality, that's surely not the reason why more females are interested in IT in Russia.
I was not suggesting that females are inferior to men, just that males and females will make vastly different life choices because of psycho-evolution.
It's a scientific fact that while male and female median IQ is the same, men have much more variability (more men at the extremes).
Just think about your reproductive strategy(not necessarily in the modern monogamous society)-- you have bilions upon billions of sperm replenished every day while females produce one egg per month. A smarter/fitter man can produce much more offsprings than a smarter/fitter female. That has got to produce some profound differences in the way men and women behave.
Centuries ago there were no women scientists, now there are, so does that mean the people like you in the transitory period claiming "Women can never be scientists due to psycho-evolution (whatever bullshit that is)" are right.
Without scientific evidence, your psycho-evolutionary boundary on what is achievable by men or women is just convenient excuse for sexism because it changes and is arbitary.
What I AM saying is maybe, just maybe there's no conspiracy against women and that women and men make different life an career choices which can simply be explained by bullshit psycho-evolution.
Without fail, during any discussion about tech and gender on these boards, "nice guys" come out of the woodwork as staunch advocates of equality in the workplace, their message couched in accusatory and bullying language.
I'll bet they're closer to being part of the problem with the industry, rather than the solution.
In my opinion, it's obvious that women being under represented in STEM is caused significantly by both evolutionary /and/ cultural factors.
The same argument goes for women in science. Albert Einstein was told he wouldn't amount to much. Doesn't mean he 'got discouraged' and quit physics. That's not why we do science - for public appreciation - we do it because we love it no matter what anyone else says. This is the point that the girls in tech people miss I think.
Instead of buying your daughters lego sets with women wearing fancy lab coats and looking into telescopes, buy them gyroscopes, or electronics kits, or lego's own DIY robot? None of the toys mentioned above feature gender and actually give a sense of what science is about.
I'm open to hear your thoughts, especially from women.