EncipheredBy

I also was pretty gender-agnostic in my choice of toys as a child, and get annoyed at parents who I assumed pushed "girly" stuff on their kids.

But then I got to know parents who were trying to actively discourage their kids from like princess garbage, but they couldn't stop it because the kids learn from their friends. I'm no child psychologist, but there's probably some age where what their peer group thinks is more important to them than what their parents have introduced at home.

I don't know how to avoid that when having kids myself besides being careful that I'm not plopping them into a school full of girls who are being told which things they should and shouldn't want to play with.

So, one thing that this article ignores is that kids pick up really strongly on what is expected of their gender. I think the "let's make programming more pink" thing is silly, BUT hey, isn't that what toy manufacturers and clothing manufacturers all do to signal "hey girls, this is for you!"?

So if you slap a bunch of pink stuff on things, yeah, you're kind of making an invitation to them to join in.

BUT I think that the "girl" version of things is also always assumed to be the "easy" version of things. Which girls pick up on too.

As a woman trying to get into tech, I'm super uninterested in woman-only bootcamp type things, since I feel like the perception will be that I "couldn't make it" in the "regular" bootcamp.

I do think it might be different for little kids though, as they might be operating more on the "I want to do what's expected of my gender" level than a grown up who is able to think "I don't care what's expected of my gender."

As pointed out on the most recent Hilarious World of Depression podcast episode, the positive affirmation in front of a mirror seems like it would never work, and many more people have realized that telling themselves really negative things about themselves works great--so why not give the opposite a shot?

An MBA in the U.S. honestly doesn't even feel like "university" in the traditional sense.

It is essentially an exchange where the student pays a massive amount of tuition money and the university gives them two years to network with people. I believe the goal is to make friends with the folks who were going to get that finance job through their connections anyway, and then maybe they can get YOU a finance job too.