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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
— despite all the programs encouraging women in stem, there is still a huge gap.  I have a teen daughter who has always liked math/compuyers.  She has done computer science camp since age 7.  This is a camp that has a particular program to encourage girls.  And yet by age 12, she was basically the only girl left in the programming stuff.  I count the heads in her AP comp sci classes, and it’s mostly boys.  There is still a lot of stigma among tween/teen girls for the tech fields (although I think no stigma for the sciences that are perceived as more “helping” sciences like Bio or Enviro).  [/quote]

Yes, you can't force girls to study STEM if they are not interested. Just like not many boys enter teaching or nursing (nursing in particular pays quite well). But we see no efforts to get more boys into those fields, and plenty of effort to get girls into certain fields. Boys are pretty much ignored.[/quote]

Actually boys are really going into nursing now that it’s a pretty well compensated field.  But my point isn’t to force girls into Stem.  It’s that there are still a lot of social pressures pushing girls away from stem.  It’s still considered geeky which is a worse condemnation for a teen girl than a teen boy.  The internet is really unwelcoming to girls—see all the online harassment of women in gaming.  And the majority of games are still made by and for males which really makes the teen tech world very male dominated.  There’s a lot of funneling that pulls girls out of tech and moms are part of the problem.  None of the UMC feminist moms I know are really encouraging their girls to get involved in CS or engineering, except the Asian ones.  Why don’t UMC  women of other races care  about this?  I don’t know.  They are all buying legos and looking for coding camps for their boys.  It drives me nuts.  I was a girl mathlete in the 80s….i did not think it would still be like this.  [/quote]

Start learning to spell.  It’s STEAM, not STEM.[/quote]

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