This morning, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg went on CBS’s the early show to encourage more women to pursue high tech jobs. Unfortunately, this is a message that even girls growing up in Silicon Valley don’t hear enough.
Flipping through the commendations given to 5th graders graduating from a tony Menlo Park elementary school, the gender differences jump off the page. For every boy lauded for “eternal enthusiasm for math and science,” there is a girl praised for her “friendly and kind personality.” Of the 37 graduating students, seven are commended for math and science. All of them are boys.
I turned the commendations into wordles. For boys, “personality” is important, but “academic” and “knowledge” are among the most commonly used words in the commendations:
For girls, “personality” dominates, and “academic” and “knowledge” have all but vanished. In their stead are “enthusiasm,” “soul,” and “commitment”:
Even if the girls and boys at this elementary school are equally good at math and science, the public messages they are receiving are very different. Boys are being taught that excelling in math and science is commendable; girls are being taught that being liked is commendable.
This is an elementary school a stone’s throw from Sandhill Road, the venture capitalists’ Wall Street. Tuition is more than $25,000 a year, and the school’s advisory board is made up of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and their spouses. Sandberg laments that there will not be gender parity at the top of business or high tech in her generation. Stories like this one cast doubt on whether we are laying the groundwork for such parity even among our youngest generation.
sarahdillard
Right on. Gender socialization is such a powerful and usually unseen force. Great way to get at the mechanics of how such socialization operates.
I like the way you framed that, Ben. Thanks!
Wow Sarah! Great food for thought!!
While I understand the longstanding concern, it’s impossible to generalize from one elementary school one year in one district to all of Silicon Valley. For a second data point, here’s exactly the opposite result: all the science fair winners from another Silicon Valley elementary school were girls. http://bit.ly/rx4gPz
As always, correlation is not causation. In this example, what is the mechanism that is holding girls back? Is it the person who write certificates, a 2nd grade teacher or their parents?
Joel
(Father of a 13-year-old future SWE member)
That’s awesome about the science fair! This piece isn’t about test scores or winning contests though, both of which are more objective. It’s about how we praise our kids when we just want to say something nice, about how we socialize our daughters. And yes, just a snapshot from one school here.
I love the wordies.
I’m skeptical. I’m reading Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness (2006). “A better education would make children and grown-ups more aware of themselves, and be more frank and less manipulative.” Women are not unfaithful to the cause of womanhood if they do not share the identical interests and behavior of men.
Uh-oh, arguing against my tabula rasa arguments about learning from the email chains. But obviously there’s an interplay between our pre-installed natural hardware and what socialization shapes us to be. An empty box can’t learn anything.
(To avoid plagiarism: “An empty box can’t learn anything” is a quote from child psychologist Paul Bloom at Yale).
This would be a stronger argument if the girls had been commended for their interests, and it was just the underlying interests that were different. But by and large, they were commended along personality dimensions.
tell em!