...I will say that my whole life has involved having my consciousness raised about these issues.
I certainly wasn't "there," years ago. The nice thing about the Nature briefing (and other feeds) is that they point these stories out. What struck me about this particular account was how tired she was of even having to talk about it all the time, even as she took talking about it as a responsibility.
I'm not sure I ever thought about that burden until just now.
My wife was a physics major when I met her. As she went to an inner city school when NY City was bankrupt and all of the textbooks were falling apart and the teachers were vastly underpaid - a few of them more interested in hitting on her than actually teaching her - certainly came to believe that "she shouldn't be there" in physics after a few University semesters, even if her boyfriend at the time also had been her physics TA.
I remember all of the attention she got, almost all of it prurient, and now recognize that one reason was that there were just not all that many women in science.
It's getting better, I see, now that my son is an engineer and in graduate school, but we're still not "there" yet with women in STEM, not to mention black women in STEM.
As for the "way they talk," while conversations with my son, while enjoyable through his whole life, are now so much more wonderful now that he's become this fine engineer.
I love that talk. To each his or her own, but life is so much richer when you appreciate this language.
I'm a chemist, and I love chemistry very much and can't imagine life without it, but if I had my life to do over I would definitely be an engineer, probably a nuclear engineer, but at the very least, a chemical engineer. My wife now works for a pretty prominent evolutionary biologist (whose undergraduate degree was in Electric Engineering) and she attended a meeting with the research group where he informed the undergraduates, very wisely I think, that they should expect to need to reinvent themselves every three years.
We do, and certainly I have needed to reinvent myself, particularly, as a boring old white guy, as to how I understand the struggles of "non-WASP" and "non-male" scientists and engineers.
These accounts help which is why I forward them here.
For the record, when I was 17, I wouldn't known what a breadboard is either. I very much doubt that I would have been told that I didn't belong there in a physics class as a result.
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