This post is inspired by an advert that I saw on youtube that highlights the damage that can happen to a young woman’s psyche with simple behaviour patterns such as telling the woman that she needs to be pretty or even just telling her she is pretty.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/XP3cyRRAfX0
I thoroughly agree with the sentiment that many of our brightest female engineers, mathematicians and developers are being discouraged before they even know that they have an interest or aptitude for technical subjects. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is helping in the general push to get more children and young adults to discover the computing realm, but we still have a long way to go until the numbers of children progressing into technical subjects at college and beyond are back where they were in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Moreso the disparity between male and female students on these STEM courses is very evident. We, as a society, need to encourage young adult women to discover an interest in technical or scientific endeavours. The more we can balance the scales the better and more-equal the world will be. This is not just a benefit to the communities that are currently biased toward males but the world, in general, will benefit with new points-of-view pushing technical and scientific discoveries which will filter into every-day life whether the general population realise it or not.
Equality is not just about ensuring that people aren’t discriminated based on gender, age, religion, race, sexual orientation, or planet-of-birth; a truly equal society benefits not just those that might previously be discriminated but those that would be the discriminators, equally!