Why most of my private students were girls?
Recently, I was listening to one of my favority music style: power metal. Then it occurred to me that most of the songs I have heard of were sung by men! Then it occurred to me, empirically, that power metal is dominated by men. It made me realize another mental state of mind that I believe is problematic, and I wish to somehow fix, but researches point out how heard it is for us to totally get rid of learnt mental states, cultural hidden unwritten rules.
Here goes the story in summary: I participate from a computer science driven community called Stack Overflow®, essentially, it is a Question and Answer website, people can ask questions, and others can answer those questions, it is quite useful when you are coding and have no time for studying, for really going deep into books. It occurred to me that whenever I see an answer with a nickname, I firstly assume that behind that name is man. Why is that so? In summary: I have in my head that men are better at programming; which consciously, I know it is not true, it is just a social unwritten rule.
By conclusion from the aforementioned story is that computer science is another area dominated by men. I remember well on my first postdoc that there was just one girl in the lab, just one! It was a lab focused on computer science; about 10 researchers; in another place I asked a guy from computer science why their lab had no girls, he said jokily: “there would be a lot of crying around” . The only place I have been wherein the women were majority was in Italy in a mathematics programme: I was the only man around! That was a quite interesting experience; in the aftermath, I was not the best around; it turned out that the person behind the scene tried to select equally in matter of gender.
Now that I think better, I have never worked with a woman directly. Why is that so? I am not sure, but I believe if I have done this choice, it was not done consciously, I have no, as far as I honestly know, something against women. Further, from all the positions of power I have seen, women are in the middle, there is always a man above. In a nice study, which I have forgotten the primary source, it is a famous study that appears in several books such as “A Elite do Atraso” by Jessé Souza and “Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think” by Tasha Eurich; they have shown that something like 90% of CEOs of big corporations are men.
The first time have seen such pattern was during my early days as private tutors; it was during high school. The majority, with rare exceptions, of my students were girls. I have found that intriguing; I used to teach Mathematics and Physics. Why most of my private students were girls?
Such question is not straightforward to reply and we can easily fall into traps, easy answers. Several studies should be done, but here goes my interpretation. In summary: girls are more concerned than men about doing well, summed with a social pressure that they are not good at math and physics. Think about a famous physicist; think about a famous mathematician; most likely, if you are honest enough to admit, they are men! Recently, I have seen a nice documentary by Nova on black holes: that was done mostly by women. I believe this is an attempt to shift the balance of this dishonest game!
In one interest study, which appears also in several books, they have tested people in general regarding their competence before and after an information was given: this information was something like “statistically, boys are better at math”; that decreased the performance of them, for the group that were in the wrong side of the statistics; it included differences of skin color and origins. Result: our society limits our potentials in general with random general rules, such as “Asian are good at math”; they are based, in general, in assumptions that the person did not give enough attention to test, and since in general it does not mess up with them, they just accept it. In “Talking to Strangers”, Malcolm Gladwell nicely discusses how we mess up when we make assumptions about others: we apply the worse assumptions, but for us, we assume they do not apply; “the other professors are influence by apples, I am not!”
We should constantly ask ourselves which society we want, and constantly revise how to get there: we have been making wrong assumptions, things may have changed. It is pretty easy to carry on with random assumptions, but it can be damaging. The continuous exercise to revise who we are and how we are working on to get there is an eternal, in my case, matinal exercise, no one is out of the hook, especially the ones on powerful positions, which ironically are the ones that tend to ignore the effects of bad judgments; some have showed how some judges, for instance, can mess up, but never accept it, even with strong evidences that they mess up.
