If I were to pick a side to favor in the debate between Pinker and Spelke, I would have to go with Spelke. Not because she dominated the debate and had a better argument, they both had very compelling and interesting statistics and research. I favor Spelke for the shear fact that I believe in her favor personally.
Once again heading back to the “glory days” of high school, the boys and girls were split pretty evenly on who were really good at math and science, and those who were not. Now I graduated with a class of 16 students and our whole high school had an average of around 70 kids. For purpose of the question at have lets say half of those kids were female, and half of those female students were good at math and science classes. So we are talking roughly 15 girls from my high school were comparable if not better than their male counterparts at the math and science subjects. I went back through my yearbook and picked out 10 girls that I knew for a fact were really good at both subjects and not one of them are in a related field. Of course this sample size is incredibly small and there is no hard evidence to be taken from it except for my personal experience.
No one is disputing the fact that girls traditionally don’t go into these fields but the real question is why. Strictly talking about my school I believe the reason is that these girls were influenced so much by what other’s expected of them, that they all wanted to go into fields where they would feel comfortable as women. Sure every once in a while a girl would come along that couldn’t care less as to what other’s thought and she did whatever she wanted. I believe it’s a numbers game. And the same can be said for a lot of other issues in society.
The thing is that the majority of society has self- conscious issues that they want to be what they think there peer’s think they should be. Is this wrong? No. Is it unfair that we all can’t just be who we are without the criticism, or sometimes just fear of criticism, from the people we surround ourselves with? Personally, I say yes. Therefore I believe that the difference between and woman who is good at math and science and chooses a different route, and a woman who goes into the field, is confidence. It’s a numbers game, and where we are at as a society, the numbers aren’t in our favor.
Questions:
1)Do you think the confidence of women and young girls has increased or decreased since the first wave of the Women’s Rights Campaign?
2)What is the biggest obstacle that is facing young girls being confident in who they are?
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