Wanoah

I recently wrote about Ada Lovelace Day and I men­tioned in passing that girls tend to ini­tially sur­pass boys  at math­em­at­ics in school. Then some­thing hap­pens, and girls almost entirely dis­ap­pear from maths and the sci­ences. I vaguely remembered read­ing about this diver­gence in maths abil­it­ies as chil­dren pro­gress through school some­where, and went look­ing for sources. It seemed like there was this clear cause and effect thing going on: girls dis­ap­pear from the sci­ence dis­cip­lines at school for some reason,  res­ult­ing in a gender imbal­ance in related careers. After writ­ing that, it seemed like a gross sim­pli­fic­a­tion, and I thought I’d try and find out a bit more about what’s going on.

First, some more simplification:

Cour­tesy of xkcd.

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24^th March 2010 is Ada Lovelace Day.

Ada Lovelace Day is an inter­na­tional day of blog­ging to cel­eb­rate the achieve­ments of women in tech­no­logy and sci­ence. The idea is to write some­thing about a woman in tech­no­logy or sci­ence that you admire.

Mar­vel­lous! This is some­thing I can get behind. Hav­ing worked in IT for over a dec­ade now, I can say from my own exper­i­ence that it’s a field that remains heav­ily pop­u­lated by the male gender, with women a dis­tinct minor­ity. I also work for a large man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany, and have wit­nessed the scarcity of women in the engin­eer­ing dis­cip­lines. It seems to me that we need to be encour­aging more women to join these pro­fes­sions. Sign me up.

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