Teens' dreams and ideas often get shot down by peers, parents and even teachers. I'm not defending bad behaviour; I just think that pointing at a few loudmouthed boys and claiming that there's the reason for the gap is pretty disingenuous. Certainly the majority of women I know would not give a lack of intelligence as the reason they didn't go to study CS.
> I agree with you until you bring up gender. Girls also talk about how boys are idiots. Women's remarks can also bring down men or uplift them
One is not like the other. Teenage female peer dynamics are heavily dominated by corumination and is directed heavily inwards. When girls bully other girls, they do it indirectly. It is more psychologically directed and intensely focused on gossip and disguised status seeking behavior. It is rarely directly confrontational, and I have rarely - if ever - heard girls talk about men's compentence in some general regard that way.
It's more like, "that guys such an idiot. He said <> and <> to me. Can you believe that?"
Teenage boys on the other hand are manifestly different. I am not an expert on male teenage behavior, but judging from the fact that the vast majority of teens sending epithets to other people online or on social media are overwhelmingly likely to be teenaged boys, I would suggest that the male pattern is aggressive and an overt dominance game.
Women don't do well in that environment. Boys often do and say things that are bewildering for anyone socialized as female to interact with.
> It's just that (especially young) women seem more susceptible to social pressure and the need to fit in, especially with other women.
Yes, female social dynamics are heavily about inclusion and exclusion. A welcoming and safe environment matters a lot more to women than it does to men.
> I just think that pointing at a few loudmouthed boys and claiming that there's the reason for the gap is pretty disingenuous
I have not made that claim.
I am just talking about my experience. Your mileage may vary.
In middle-school and high-school I have never heard talk about girls being less competent than boys. You couldn't. Girls did better at school. Girls were Lisa Simpson, and boys were Bart Simpson. If there was a stereotype, that's what it was. If you went to a remedial class at my school(s), it would have been 3/4 boys. The vast majority of suspensions were given to boys.
Maybe the schools I went to were the exception, but no way could this be a singular experience.
>Women don't do well in that environment. Boys often do and say things that are bewildering for anyone socialized as female to interact with.
I feel you're making generalizations that don't reflect reality.
>A welcoming and safe environment matters a lot more to women than it does to men.
It matters to everyone. Who doesn't want a workplace that is welcoming and safe?
You're basically saying that males are more resilient and assertive - this doesn't mean that females can't "shoot down" boys, however indirectly. When you're constantly hearing about "toxic masculinity" being the problem and all males are being equated to toxic, entitled narcissists who might turn "creepy" on you at any moment, are you sure that this isn't a drag to the average guy? Guys care about being included socially, too. They can deal with overt hostility if they have to, but let's not pretend that they'll be happy about it.
In fact, for most of my educational life the "top student of the class" has been female, even through engineering and maths.
Am I some kind of odd outlier? is the experience on other countries different? I'm genouinly curious.
[0]https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.forbes.com...
Perhaps those fields are perceived as not social, introverted, not warm or inviting; but I feel it would probably be a bad idea to market them as such and force a lot of young women into engineering and CS out of some misguided principle rather than their own future happiness.
Of course there are certain men that make claims about women's ability to do math, but in my experience those are often men that clearly don't possess that ability themselves... Their opinion might be mostly detrimental to their own offspring rather than to society as a whole. Those tend not to be people whose boys attend university either.
Those who survived this filter tend to be less of the tech fan boy culture.
Of course being a girl had a special status, there's just no way around that when they are below 10%. There were many cases when a class had only 1 or 2 girls, or I remember when the game design class had their first ever female student, whom I knew. She didn't recall any inappropriate things said to her. But you have to have a really strong interest in the topic to accept being the only girl in so many situations and groups. Just "going with the flow" won't carry you there.
This whole thing must have some deeper roots than what it's being reduced to today, because the effect comes up in many countries even before US influence became this strong. In fact in the former Eastern Bloc countries there was a lot of encouragement for women getting educated and getting more traditionally male jobs.
Edit: It can also become weirdly specific; participation in computer science and physics remain quite low here (Ireland), say, but I believe most chemistry undergrads are now women.
Engineering and physics have similar ratios around 10% to 20%, while maths is way higher around 50/50 (the rates for the classes I was taking were actually higher, but that's another story). Chemistry here also is mostly women.
The only hypothesis that fits my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, is that there's quite a difference in the interests of men and women, and that the country differences in enrollment are more a symptom of how the curricula are structured.
For example, Spain does not have CS degrees structured like in the anglosphere, so depending the subfield you intend to work on, you should go to engineering instead. Most of the women I met at engineering would have chosen a CS degree over engineering if there was one. I have seen stark differences too in physics, were the majority of women there wanted to pursue pure theoretical physics with pretty much none of them showing interest in applied physics.
If we find more systematic ways in which people are getting knocked down, we should probably work on those, too.
"Toxic masculinity" says hi. It's definitely a two-way street!
They are very poor words if the intention is to communicate and find agreement on each topic.
Boys were considered inherently mischievous, prone to cheating or making shortcuts, and always up to no good, while girls were considered rule-abiding, smart and hard-working.
Also, girls are more social and better at relationships, but also cant have by gender good relationship among them as they are destined to be basically bitches.
Boys have totally better relationships among them, but they of course just cant be without physically bullying each other which somehow does not suggest that something is wrong with relationships.
Things just aren't that simple, and there is tendency of only highlighting these 'microaggressions' suffered by young girls. I don't dismiss that it happens, but growing up sucks for everybody and these indignities are suffered by everyone. And it doesn't end with school, when I started working I went out to some trade-shows as a technical resources with a young (under-30) sales guy. We got no respect from the 50+ year old gray beards in our industry. As in, we, and especially him, got overtly disrespected because of our inexperience and youth. And when you're young, you always feel like you're behind (because you are), and you're desperately trying to push forward and gain recognition, respect and acceptance and you really feel the small daily indignities, from the meeting you weren't invited to, to project you aren't on, to your ideas being ignored (not even dismissed, just ignored), to simply not getting the credibility or respect or recognition you feel you deserve.
Personally I knew plenty of boys that were not fuckups. I know also boys who are fuckups or went through periods where they as kids were troubles, but I know also plenty of perfectly fine boys.
Of course each of us has to deal with a plethora of cultural influences and pressures, but in this case you're just asserting things and maybe gaslighting a little. Someone shared an anecdote that counteracts your assertion and you go and post hoc fit your conclusion by claiming there are in fact other secret stereotypes that must be there as well. Maybe they aren't there.
>Personally I knew plenty of boys that were not fuckups.
So do I.
In my case, however, all the fuckups I know are boys. All of them. I don't know what that anecdote says, but it says something.
Me posting first time: these stereotypes coexist.
You: You are opposing him and gasslighting. Also, he contradicted you.
Me now: wtf. Also, he could not contradict my assertion, because I joined only after him and made no assertion before.
If you want some hard data to back this up, take a look at the stats about male/female university attendance in the UK. You'll see it's becoming ever more weighted towards women. I cannot browse the web or social media without being bombarded with pro-female propaganda. And yet it's women that are being discriminated against?!
Bonkers.
What do you think girls think and say of boys? This is just stupid (and incorrect) victimism, directed at a gender, when the other one acts the same.
Someone using that argument is either 1) completely unaware of the experiences of the other gender or 2) being dishonest.
There's definitely still a strong 'boyish' culture where boys can say almost anything they like and it's OK, but girls (for whatever reason) won't. It's not about who's better - it's about what we let people get away with.
Also it's not about thinking. Thinking is the ultimate change you want, but we can't see and know what people around us think, but we can still try to enact standards of reasonable, gentle (non-violent if you will) communication.
School was much more set up for girls and they were more successful on average.
I don't remember boys saying girls are dumb or the reverse. The stereotype was more about girls being obedient and tidy and organized and serious while boys are messy, forgetful, chaotic and mischievous.
Edit: this last point also makes it weird for me when people equate male with order and female with chaos. I guess the stereotype may have reversed since then? Or the adult stereotype is the reverse of the child stereotype?
I have very rarely encountered any hostility towards women in professional environment though.
I you hear that a lot in your environemnt - maybe its time to speak up against it and/or change it for something better.
These moments stay with you and they impede you at moments when you need to be free. They push you away from being the best version of you that you can be.