If people want to talk about PC bullshit....

No, that bureaucrats should be respectful of students' culture, especially one that prides itself in intellectual accomplishment and celebrates science and technology.

Right, that's precisely the position held by Ms "why the fuck did you take the job!?!?!?!?"

Yup. A big cause of the wage gap is that women choosing lower paying careers

Indeed. Instead of choosing to be CEOs, doctors and lawyers, they become female CEOS, female doctors, and female lawyers.

I'm sorry you're choosing sarcasm over intelligence.

I can tell you from my own experience--which is actually more recent than you'd think given my age--there aren't any (external) barriers to women pursuing careers in the science and technology fields. Plenty of women do so. But not as many women as men do. And it isn't nerd culture---you'd have been hard-pressed to find ANY outward endorsement of nerd culture in the engineering department where I went to school (San Jose State University).

Interestingly, my own (admittedly, anecdotal) experience is that far more immigrant women pursue STEM degrees than those born here. Take a look in the classrooms at my school and you'll see lots of Indian and Chinese women, even a few Ethiopian women, but very few white girls and almost no black girls (virtually no black males, either, but that's another story).

From the QZ article, emphasis mine.

This is the most significant argument against the program being the best way to accomplish the goal. The no-décor room examines the null state, and yet girls are still opting out. Whatever it is, the décor is not at issue*, and the art and nature posters compensate a bit for something else. Perhaps it's the standard (patriarchy-imposed) gender-specific cultural touchstones that are missing in the no-décor environment, but then this program is merely reinforcing those gender norms, having lost the forest (our culture as a whole makes it hard for girls to go into CS) for the trees (there aren't enough girls in CS).

In short, this program is just a smarter version of "if it's for girls it has to be pink" thinking that is routinely excoriated.

The other thing that is unexamined in any of these summaries (I haven't read the whole study) is what effect the art and nature posters have on the boys. Are the girls' numbers coming up because more boys are dropping out?

If the whole study is as bad as the summary, I don't think you can conclude much at all from it.

As a woman who was in engineering and left I got along with the guys really well. There was only inclusion from them.

I left because I realized I was in engineering to prove a point, once I proved it I moved on. The guys were nerds, but so was I.

I have to agree. This whole thing sounds like blaming the geeks for a problem they did not create. Everyone was all about family, career, and mainstream culture in the places I worked. No one tabletop rpg or talked about trek unless there was a movie out.

I wonder if it's just an engineering thing. My undergrad science classes were pretty much geared for people going into healthcare (pre-dental, pre-med, and pre-pharm mostly) and they were split pretty evenly between genders and overwhelmingly white across the board.

Wanting to help people (dental, med, pharm) is shared across both sexes. Wanting to design a better gear tooth is pretty much a male geek thing.

Wonder how many male nursing students are demanding a stop that that kind of discussion and a change to that culture and how far they'd get if they tried.

He does that a lot.

I actually read the study, and yes, it's total horseshit. A perfect example of the kind of shallow, pedantic crap that passes for research in academia.

The first thing I noted was that the study was originally published in 2009. Why thecollegefix.com thought it was newsworthy in 2016 is anyone's guess, probably because it involves Trek and they knew it would be clickbait.

Suffice to say, the paper begins with anecdotal bullshit, moves into a flawed methodolgy that fails to account for obvious variables, trades in poorly defined research terms, and finally arrives at a pre-determined conclusion that supports the narrative the author wanted to peddle all along.

It's really an opinion piece dressed up as an experiment.

Here's a thought - maybe the reason the author discontinued study in a STEM field to settle for a second-rate career in a soft science like psychology had nothing to do with Star Trek, or Trek posters on the walls, or male students who she didnt care for because they were geeks and she thinks geeks are yucky. Maybe it was because she just wasn't intelligent enough to handle the work. Now there's a novel idea, the reason had to do with her own inadequacies, and not this Victimhood Inc. garbage.

The butthurt runs deep and wide with you, Ahab.

How many nursing classes use 'Scandal or whatever big soap opera' is happening as the basis for learning exercises?

Oh, you missed thst part? Didn't realize that it was talking about professors using sci-fi to teach?

Don't worry, you aren't the first one to ignore the facts to keep the nerd ragasm going.

That's a bunch of BS. You have no idea what you are talking about. Did it ever occur to you that some of us here are programmers and have first-hand experience?

But he lives in Seattle, reads local "micro-boards" that are far more responsive to his opinions and is sooooo much more sophisticated than you.

If it wasn't already obvious a hundred posts ago, this post clearly demonstrates that Ginger Twat didn't bother to read the article he linked to. The article does not talk about professors using sci-fi to teach STEM subjects.

I'm a developer, but I never went to school for it...so I missed out.

No butt hurt, just a dispassionate observation of your nature.

Trek was never discussed in my CS class's that I had to take for my math degree. And they were basics level CS classes.

Just my antidotal observation.

Last time I made an observation I was told I was wrong about it by people who don't experience my life or where I live.

The closest I came to Star Trek being part of a lesson was by a Russian instructor in a General Chemistry lecture about the different levels for electrons and how they can more between then, by using a Ferengi with bottles of liquor on a set of shelves. Best chemistry lecture ever.