I don't pretend to be able to unravel the gordian knot of culture and innate disposition, but I think the gap in science careers starts much earlier, for whatever reason. At my daughter's preschool the boys run around with Power Rangers, Transformers, and rockets, and build elaborate things with the legos. These toys belonging to the preschool and my daughter could play with if she choose, but she does not. By and large, the girls run around playing with the animals, the dress up materials, and the play dough. Perhaps culture has already soaked into them, or perhaps there is something innate there, perhaps the teachers are directing them, though I haven't observed it, or I suspect most likely, all of these factors combine.

I'm a science geek myself (currently getting a Ph.D.) , and I'd love for my five year old daughter, my only child, to be a science geek as well. I try to encourage her. While she has said that she wants to go on a safari, and go to rocket school, those one-off comments from her are not backed up by her choice in toys and activities. The rocket toys remain firmly at the bottom of the basket. She draws rainbows and flowers, while her male peers draw Power Rangers and explosions. As I said, I don't pretend to know why.

Insofar as those choices reflect a child's obsessions, however formed, those obsessions will have a big impact in how sensitive they are to conditions later on. The love of the thing, I suspect, could make part of the difference observed in college. If you go into science or engineering as a career, as something that you want to do because that way lay success, as simply one choice out of many you could have made, it is a more fragile attraction than if feel a compulsion for the subject. If it is a "mere" career choice, it will critically matter what kind of feedback you get from your teachers and peers. If it's an obsession, it won't. When I enrolled as an undergraduate electrical engineer, it was not to prepare for a career. It was to continue my obsession with physics, electricity, and computers, it was because I love to tinker with things, and I could not stand that there were technologies out there that I did not understand. I would have studied and tinkered with these things if I hadn't been able to go to college. Once in, nothing short of flunking out would have deterred me, and even then I probably would have continued tinkering with electronics in the garage. I went to a big school, and I saw lots of different kinds of people enrolled in engineering. Some of my friends had enrolled in engineering simply because it seemed like a good career, or because their parents thought it'd be a good career, even though they lacked any innate obsession with the subject themselves. Some of them were successful anyway, but a lot of them switched to some other major at the first sign of difficulty, a C in a class or something. The majority of the graduating engineering class, though, were hard core. We would have built home-brew robots while working at Denny's before we would have done anything else with our time.

Anyway, all of this to say that the nature and depth of the motivation that you have going in is a big factor in the sensitivity that you have to the conditions once you are there. Observing how quickly my daughter, and most of her peers, have latched onto fairly stereotypical male/female obsessions, I think that changing the nature of motivation going in, if possible at all, will have to happen much much earlier.


Kolmogorov

I think you make a good point: innate drive/obsession is basically a requirement for a scientific career. (Incidentally, I'm a EE PhD student as well, and I certainly can attest to the difference between the different "kinds" of engineering students).

But I'll argue that your definition of "science geek" might be too limited. Sure, she doesn't want to play with rocket ships or draw explosions, but does that really rule out a scientific predisposition? There's more to even the hard sciences than blowing things up, and softer sciences like linguistics and anthropology (sadly) involve hardly any combustion at all!

Inquisitiveness is the only meaningful measure of scientific aptitude and interest, not an obsession with technology. So, while I don't have children myself, I doubt that you have anything to fear from the rainbows and flowers. Maybe she won't grow up to study engineering, but there's still a whole lot of science left.

I probably oversold the "sadly" part. I would, of course, love to share my interests with her, and I constantly buy her things in that light. I have found, though, that whatever she does pleases me. I couldn't stomach unicorns before I had a daughter, but she is fond of them, and that makes me fond of them. I kind of like the rainbows and flowers. Before I had a daughter, I couldn't imagine how anyone could sit through an episode of My Little Pony without clawing their eyes out. But the mere fact that she likes it makes me like it. So I'm completely happy with whatever she does. It's only sadly that she doesn't play with rockets in the limited sense that I would have fun playing with her.

Kolmogorov

You are quite eloquent for a science geek!

Don't worry - she still has potential! Flowers and animals? She could be a biologist! You should encourage her interest in those things and buy her books to look at, take her to the zoo, share interesting animal facts with her, etc. She clearly has no interest in rockets/buildings except that you want her to... but that's only a small subset of science. You should encourage the things you already know she likes. If she likes dolls... teach her more about the human body. You can make anything scientific if you try hard enough. :) I liked unicorns and rainbows, too, but I am still a science nerd.

@Kolmogorov

You had such an eloquent post; your daughter is lucky to have you there encouraging her.

As other posters have said, though, there's a lot of science out there. And she's only five. There's a lot of time for her to get interested in all kinds of different things.

As an example, I'm a biology geek myself. I was interested in all the typical girly things when I was little; but when I was little my mom was also training to be a paramedic and I got interested in looking at her textbooks (especially the pictures of lawnmower accidents.) That led to an interest in anatomy and eventually a desire to study medicine. I really love microbiology as well, which I didn't even discover until I was in college.

I appreciate where you are coming from, but I think you are dangerously oversimplifying. For the record (and b/c it informs what I'm about to write), I am a woman and an astrophysicist. As a child I loved dolls and frilly pink dresses. I carried my dolls around obsessively, and I created entire life histories for them. I loved to take care of them and "mother" them. As I got older, my love for dolls didn't diminish, but I also liked to build model rockets and airplanes.

My point is that a proclivity toward science, even the "hard" sciences, does not preclude the expression of "feminine" characteristics. Your daughter may not become an engineer, but her interests as a toddler and preschooler are not a definitive indicator of her ultimate career interests. And whether you say it to her or not, she will likely pick up on the fact that you think her interests are incompatible with a scientific career...and it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I also want to address the claim that science must be an "obsession" for someone to succeed. Well, I can safely say that physics is not an obsession for me, but I enjoy it and excel at it. I got a PhD b/c the subject interested me. I am also interested in many other things, but that seemed to be the most challenging. I think it's easy to dismiss very real discrimination against women in STEM fields by arguing they simply have too thin a skin or too tenuous an interest to succeed. To be honest, I feel that having people who take a more disinterested view toward their research can be useful. B/c I don't have the same all-or-nothing passion (not that I don't enjoy what I do, but I just know that I have other options), I feel I am often more objective. I'm not afraid that publishing an unpopular result might ruin my career...and I'm less invested in one theory over another. I just want to get it right.

You sound like a wonderful father, and I would encourage you to continue letting your daughter grow into whomever she will become. But don't jump to conclusions...people are much more complex than you can possibly imagine. I have bachelor's degrees in physics and English lit. I have an MS in engineering, and I have a PhD in physics. I work as a scientist at a gov't lab...and have also served as a science policy fellow in Washington. I doubt that my parents could have predicted any of that when I was five years old. And I think it's pretty difficult to tease out what about that is "feminine" and what is "masculine". I can tell you that part of my motivation for becoming a scientist was a strong desire to help other people...goes all the way back to taking care of my dolls I suspect.

Thanks everyone, for this discussion. It's what the internet was supposed to be.

This is a very nice article and you've touched on a complicated subject. Even if its not always obvious our kids are subject to very strong stereotypes from their parents, peers, and the media. We once witnessed a young boy in a toy store being severely scolded by his father for picking up a doll. His peers would probably be even more cruel. To a certain extent you are her antidote to society. On the other hand, I think you shouldn't fret if she has different interests than your own. There's a lot of science in flowers and rainbows and you can easily foster her fascination for these things by considering with her how they became the way they are. If she ends up being an artist instead of a scientist her appreciation beauty at the level of atoms or galaxies will not harm her creativity. Its probably more important that she develop her own passions and pursuits than to grow up trying to satisfy to your expectations and desires. If she's like my daughters then she'll introduce you to joys that you never before appreciated.

I don't really think that having an interest in unicorns, dolls and flowers means that your daughter won't be interested in the hard sciences. I loved My Little Ponys and my American Girl Doll (I had Molly) when I was a girl. I'm currently ~1-1.5 years away from a phd in nuclear physics. I think that you do emphasize one of the problems women in the hard sciences face. We are often told, indirectly of course, that we have to choose between being "girly" and being "sciency". I think that this is sad, because it does discourage women from going into the field. For instance, one of my friends in grad school will not wear anything feminine at school because she doesn't want her fellow students to view her as a girl, only as a physicist.

I also think that even at the age of five, children are feeling the effects of what culture says is proper behavior for girls and boys. If a five year old walks into a room where all the girls are playing with dolls and all the boys are playing with legos, the probability is high that the child will play with the toy of the "appropriate" gender because human beings are natural conformists. So, even if you are being supportive, all it takes are enough parents encouraging her peers to behave in a stereotypical manner to sway everyone.

Other studies have shown that one of the biggest determinants of whether women go into hard sciences is whether or not the pre-university level of education has mandatory math classes for every year. A disproportionate number of young women "opt out" of advanced math classes if they're given the option, and both males and females who skip that "senior year" math class (whatever level it might have been) are much, much less likely to major in a real science. My advice to you is to require that your daughter take a math class every single year until college, and every single semester until she declares a major in college. That's probably the most effective 'structural' choice you can make.