And this brings us back to how gendered these things have become, right?
It completely does.
But then the Humanities get shafted a second time because “girls can do STEM too”, while laudable for many reasons, also reinforces “stuff for boys is cool, stuff for girls sucks”. It’s like second wave feminism all over again. I haven’t seen any “why are you knitting instead of soldering” commentaries as such, beyond those which wonder why “makers” is only making things traditionally thought of as made by guys, but it’s implicit.
For the current set of adults there’s a bit of insulation, what with biologists and mathematicians using hyperbolic crochet to describe coral reef models, and math and comp sci talents like Norah Gaughan and Shirley Paden turning to knit design successfully and creating amazing work. But I don’t know if the younger generation who are children and teens now are getting exposed to that.
Sadly can only upvote once
I’m informed she’s a demon knitter (this by my tame competition lawyer, who does tapestry and embroidery in the boring bits.)
Having read Cheaper by the Dozen and learned about the history of public education I know about Taylor. My personal nickname for him is “Father of Repetitive Strain Injuries”. That’s unfair of me because he did do work to prevent them, but the whole “cog” and “efficiency” concepts he unleashed created an epidemic of them.
I believe he also contributed to entrenching a gendered work force; at a time where disruptive technologies should have been creating opportunities, his work encouraged stereotyping.
So yeah, not a fan.
Well, I’m an ex-teacher in Canada who cited a British professor/novelist, so, yes.
Interesting. One thing to consider is that science & engineering have become so complex now that it takes a lot of education to master, especially interdisciplinary ones such as biophysics or ecological engineering. My college schedule was completely full; yet I could only fit one humanities or social science course per semester. Same for my SO. But we both fill our free time with non-technical stuff: jewelry making, writing, crochet, illustration, and so on.
That’s a really good point – not all human endeavours stem from what’s taught in a classroom.
There’s a novel I read as a teacher (there was a class’s worth of copies in a storeroom – the English department was trying to figure out what to keep, and no-one on staff had read it) called The Gate to Women’s Country. As a novel it’s hard to recommend – I wish the writing was better, and it argues for eugenics based on behavioural traits – but one of the concepts I found compelling was that in this post-post-apocalypse society, every capable adult member was expected to master one art, one craft, and one science. One of the major characters was a doctor who participated in the annual theatre festival and also did pottery, if I recall correctly. It’s still something I’d like to see more of in formal education.
I wouldn’t make actually mastering it compulsory. But definitely exposure to and learning about such things should be. Some people are happy putting their entire being into their vocation.
I didn’t mean that you were guilty of that stereotyping - perhaps I should delete it.
I find myself at the moment either misunderstanding or being misunderstood a lot, so apologies.
i hear you. i was cutting it short because it makes me so bitter. as much as i appreciate bitter as a flavor, as an emotion it sucks 
seriously, i make recommendations for talented female students going to jr. high to get into pre-ap classes as well as for talented black and hispanic students. sometimes there’s crossover between those categories. then i get to hear the jr. high teachers complain that i’m doing too much “affirmative action” and not sending enough information about the white students. i have even had a teacher accuse me of reverse discrimination.
/me-raises-hand
School did not know what to do with me at all. I excelled at math AND art. Bored to tears by everything else. My report cards were Ds and A+s. I frustrated everyone (and had no ambition, OG slacker for the win!)
I remember being told I had to choose math/science or art/music/drama in GRADE EIGHT. The guidance counsellor told me there was no career that combined everything, and that I had to choose now because we started picking career courses in grade fucking eight. (Which honestly explains my resume, theatre to manufacturing to education.)
Hilariously, I’m now the administrator for a University program (the first of its kind in Canada) that merges business and arts. “Where business savvy meets creative passion” - because suddenly we’ve realized we need graduates that understand the culture of arts but that can also balance a budget. Crazy talk! You can’t do both! Only one! /s
Oh, and just to stay on track: our program is 90% female. My thought is this is where the girls who were “good at math” but didn’t want to jump into the poison well of STEM, but also who were interested in fashion/theatre/etc - this is where they all came because we’re the only ones who have said “you can do both”. (our applicant to acceptance ration is 10:1, funny that eh?)
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WHAT IS THIS OMG DID SHE JUST INTERVIEW ME AND ALL MY FRIENDS!
Yes this is a complete sentence goddammit!
“thwarted by boomers who can’t afford to retire and threatened by the prospect of leap-frogging millennials…49 percent of Gen Xers feel stalled in their careers.”
OH GOD THIS x100000000 THIS!
I was just shocked someone remembered Gen Xers exist. All you ever hear about is boomers chasing that sweet millennial advertising money – for stuff millennials always say they can’t afford.
I’ve never heard it put so well!
All my bosses have been boomers.
Everyone I’ve ever hired, and are now coworkers are millennials.
Its getting rarer each year to find another GenX. And when we do, we flock together so fast.
We’re so outnumbered!
There’s so many more of both sides!
And the one thing the boomers do that I CANNOT STAND is this whole “ohh, but they’re digital natives, they do things DIFFERENTLY” BS. Every time I hear about how “millennials are doing X” it’s something me and all my Gen X friends and my boomer but tech savvy mother all do too. It’s not really an age thing, even though the marketers want to make it that way.
My Gen X friends and I are sick of hearing about how the office environment is going to change to WHAT WE’VE BEEN ADVOCATING FOR YEARS because millennials like it better that way. I keep hearing about “disruptive change” and when I get particulars it’s things I got in trouble for advocating for ten years ago.
Okay, rant off. But sheesh.
Where do the social sciences fit into that? What about cognitive science, philosophy of technology, or history of technology? Law? What about education itself?
If I had to choose between non-interdisciplinary liberal arts and non-interdisciplinary STEM, I’d choose STEM in a hot second, because I would be a drudge but I’d be an employable drudge.
However, it turns out that in the real world, not only are liberal arts grads employable because they are disciplinary, but STEM grads are as well. Any STEM grads who do not adapt with the times and only do whatever is on their diploma find themselves stuck doing the same grunt work until that grunt work is declared obsolete.
Yep. Right now, I’m surrounded by Boomers and Millennials. The Boomers are really fucking depressing, and have basically been hanging around in the same job for 20+ years for various reasons. They have no passion and no creativity left, assuming they ever had any. The Millennials have passion and creativity, but they don’t know how to do anything, because not only are they young, but they can’t really think for themselves. There are a few GenXers here, and we get most of the stuff accomplished, but we don’t really fit in anywhere, we just kinda exist.
No idea how they were handling other students, I was in grade eight. I was good at math and I liked to draw. Apparently that was confusing for everyone.
This!
They don’t! They really really don’t! Its mind boggling! They don’t know they don’t know stuff too, its so weird. I spend a lot of time coaching kids into NOT reinventing the wheel. “we created an event ticketing website for your phone!” “oh, is this different from Eventbrite?” “…whats Eventbrite?” (actual conversation I actually had with students) - now to be fair to youngens, I also do this for my bosses.
Honestly 99% of my job is “knowing how to google”.
Very true. When in the early 1980s I was asked where I had learned to design industrial data acquisition systems, I used to reply “this stuff did not exist when I was at university.” And it was true. The principles, yes.
I think I made my first pitch involving what we would now call “cloud computing” in around 2000, and ever since I’ve been encountering people telling me why it can’t possibly work for big IT projects. Many of those people had BlackBerries in the early years and then iPhones, but they didn’t see the disconnect.
This is partly why I think women have more chance in “technology” companies than they realise, provided they find the right environment. In my experience women focus more on what is to be achieved, men more on the hardware. (Or a particular software approach). The former approach (find problem, identify tool, solve problem) is better than have tool, find problem, try to apply tool to problem.
I was once in a job interview and the interviewer kept asking me questions about the process of buying a server farm, how much a server costs, etc. and I was totally flummoxed. I am not an IT guy or a sysadmin or whoever is in charge of buying servers, and I don’t claim to be.
Apparently, the guy asked me these questions because I had the phrase “data acquisition” on my resume 
Designing these things is hard work. Everything, from the filters and impedance matching to the scheduling and control, needs to be designed specifically for the sensors and the phenomenon you’re trying to sense. Most of this stuff they don’t even teach in school. Each part of it, yes, and all the parts together would make a good graduate program, but the overall theory behind data acquisition systems isn’t covered in nearly enough depth.
…is actually a decades-old concept labeled with a fancy little buzzword to make it sound modern. If you were pitching cloud computing in 2000, you were way ahead of the buzzword, but right in the middle of the development of actual cloud computing technology.