Pinkifying Science: Where it comes from and why it's ingrained

We've all seen efforts to market products to girls, and they all seem to look like this: paint it pink, give it a girly name, put some relatable pretty girls in the ads, and there you have it.

Case in point.

So it should come as no surprise to see the same approach applied to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math, in case you weren't sure and have just reached a point where it's gone on too long and you feel weird asking) advocacy. Efforts to tie girly things like cheerleading and makeup to STEM may cause me and other females knee-jerk reactions, but is it as ill-advised an approach as we think (and for the reasons we think)?

It seems that STEM education is in such a dire state that all approaches to advocacy involve some sort of "gloss". Sports, cute things, movies, explosions, etc. are being used to get kids (and adults) interested in STEM. If we unpack this approach, it seems like the more effective approaches scream, "hey, this thing you already like? THAT'S STEM!!!" 

So clearly the assumption is that girls like cheerleading and makeup. And while all us female scientists cry foul at that, because OBVIOUSLY you can like STEM and still keep all your female naughty bits without having cheerleaders tell you that you can, we should remember back to the points in our childhood where we wanted "the girl toy" from our McDonald's Happy Meals and wanted to be just like girly girl Jessica Wakefield from Sweet Valley High. All kids go through a period where they are trying to establish their gender identities, which may lead little girls to wear pink and little boys to join Pop Warner leagues. As stereotypical as it sounds, these kids might go for it and lean into these gender identities...because they think they should. Little boys think they SHOULD play football, have GI Joes, and hate the color pink. Little girls think they SHOULD wear frilly dresses, play with dolls, and only go to the pink aisle in the toy store. 

And therein lies the problem. Just go to any toy store and count the pink aisles. One, maybe two. Now count all the other aisles. Please bear with me while I extricate my eyebrows from my hairline. 

The problem that plagues STEM advocacy for girls is the same problem that plagues toy stores: reduced access. So while girls are stuck playing with "appropriate" toys, namely dolls, that encourage them to nurture and beautify, boys play with:

• action figures
• Nerf and other toy guns
• Legos and other building toys
• Transformers (anyone who says that they're the same thing as action figures is going to have a punch in the face, courtesy of me)
• Big Wheels and other vehicles
• etc.

But wait, you say, can't girls play with these things too (the same question applies to boys playing with dolls)? Of course, and they do, but chances are they're going to be discouraged by parents, peers, and in time they'll internalize all of that and start discouraging themselves, and go ahead and ask for that pink doll (I'm sorry, I never really had dolls, so I assume that's a thing.) The problem is sociiiiiiiiietyyyyyy, maaaaan. 

The same applies to STEM advocacy. OF COURSE girls and women can like sports, movies, explosions, video games, projectile weaponry (some of my favorite things, actually)...and STEM. STEM advocacy groups just need to increase female access to ALL narratives, to break down these SHOULDS that originate in childhood. Show us a woman who designs video games, builds weapons, crunches numbers for a pro sports team, etc. And at the same time, show us a man who's a nurse or social worker. No part of STEM is off limits to ANY gender. 

Except maybe dildo model. Is that STEM?

De-Extinction: A New Hope for Wonder

It made me laugh, alright?

I recently had the opportunity to attend TEDxDeExtinction in DC, an event that brought together conservation biologists, synthetic biologists, and others to discuss reviving and restoring extinct species. Since the event, the response has been overwhelmingly negative, with most people focusing on the process of de-extinction:
1. Finding or generating the extinct organism's DNA
2. Creating an embryo
3. Finding a suitable surrogate
4. The surrogate gestating the embryo to birth
5. The organism surviving for longer than a few minutes after birth
6. Finding the proper habitat for that organism
7. Repeating the process for several organisms so they're able to reproduce
8. Observing and measuring the effect of their reintroduction on the ecosystem, etc.

Clearly, that's a lot of steps, and clearly, there are many possible points of failure, so picking this process apart is like shooting fish in a barrel, which is what everyone is doing now. But why? I think we must be discussing all of this because it's all we CAN do, because right now? We're pre-step 1.

I posted a while back lamenting the loss of wonder in our society. With the moon landing many many years behind us and all other discoveries and advancements seeming far less glorious in comparison (can we get a little excitement over the Higgs Boson, people being cured of AIDS, and the samples being collected by Curiosity, please?), it's been seeming like we as a society just can't get excited over science anymore. That is, until you walk up to someone and tell them that the work being done by synthetic biologists today might be able to (eventually) bring back the woolly mammoth. Or the dodo. Or the tasmanian tiger. Or the passenger pigeon. I'd be willing to bet that, after they get the requisite Jurassic Park references out of their system, they'd be kind of excited. Maybe even really excited. And the person I was imagining in that scenario is an adult. Try telling that to a kid.

I'm pretty sure that, after you rehinge all your limbs and regain your hearing, you'll find that kid researching their favorite extinct animal, trying to learn as they can process about synthetic biology, and putting together science fair projects about what they've found. They might go and ask their parents for woolly mammoth pajamas, bedsheets, and posters, just like kids in the '60s asked for rockets, astronauts, and robots. And this kid might eventually go to school to become a synthetic biologist.

With all of our talk of the leaky STEM pipeline, I really wonder what there is to gain by squelching the underlying hope of de-extinction. Are we somehow worried that these synthetic biologists FORGOT how to do real science? Y'know, with experimental replication and peer review? Are we worried that this will take funds away from those of us doing "approved" science? Because I gotta tell you, the pot of funding for ALL science is shrinking. Fast. So clearly, efforts to just keep up the status quo and go for applied research the way we have been isn't helping to punt more grants our way.

All I'm asking is for some understanding of how powerful hope and wonder can be in propelling people to do things. Initial skepticism in the absence of data should not be a deterrent; I'm sure there were many people fearing a trip to the moon would yield space invaders or something, and were making arguments like the ones in this article from 1963. But we did it anyways, and look what came of it: technological innovations, increased knowledge, and kids diving headlong into STEM. We need another moon landing, and de-extinction could be it.

"Do you know Lat Pack?"

Charlotte: Why do they switch the r's and the l's here? 
Bob: Uh... for yuks. You know? Just to mix it up. 
Bob: They have to amuse themselves, 'cause we're not making them laugh. 

Ok, so it's time for me to address a myth that gets on my multilingual neuroscientist nerves, which is illustrated perfectly in the little section of dialogue above, from Lost In Translation. In our little American melting pot, we are confronted with the accents of non-native English speakers every day. While I'm not really going to address the idea that the near misses of the American pronunciation of English shouldn't be the object of ridicule (cause seriously, you try speaking Spanish/Chinese/Korean/Italian and see how you get made fun of. By the Chinese in particular. We're a judgey group), I feel it's important to give context for these near misses.

All humans are born with the ability to understand and produce any language...well...ever. As an infant, you have a full vocabulary of phonemes, which are the smallest component parts of all speech. Phonemes cover everything from the slight changes in mouth openness between an English "m" and "b" to the massive differences between vowel-heavy languages like Japanese and the consonant-heavy South African click languages. For example, in Chinese, we have different melodic tones for all our words. Mandarin Chinese has 4 different tones, known as yin, yang, sang, and chu, and they all carry a different musical note and emphasis (by the way, Cantonese Chinese has 9. I'm sure we're all great at singing). Each of these melodic tones is a different phoneme. As you grow and hear more and more of the same phonemes around you, you lose the ability to hear others. This is all part of a regular "pruning" process your brain goes through - why keep things around that aren't necessary? The pruning takes place pretty early - infants stop responding to other-language phonemes at about 6 months of age. 

Once your brain specializes in a language, those phonemes get reinforced. Each time you hear a hard English "b", your brain is reminded of what "b" sounds like. Same goes for the rounded English "r" and the lilting English "l". You start to expect those phonemes. So when you hear a lilting Japanese "r", and a rounded Japanese "l", they deviate so much from your understanding of r-ness and l-ness that you think they must be switched. Truth is, they're both just far closer to neutral than you expect. 

*Note: this is not scientific in any way, just a visual representation of my point.

Now, while it looks like they're not that far apart, one of the things this graphic doesn't capture is how reinforced your native phonemes are. Because your understanding of the hard American "r" is so reinforced that you expect a certain type of "r"-ness, the distance between the Japanese "r" and the American "r" becomes far more pronounced. This reinforcement/expectation ends up putting the lilting Japanese "r" closer to the American "l" on the spectrum. So, rather than looking at this graphic as a continuous flat plane, imagine the American "r" and "l" being valleys or vortexes. A native speaker would have to travel a farther distance to get from the American "r" to the Japanese "r" than it takes to get from the Japanese "r" to the American "l". The same thing happens with the rounded Japanese "l", which is understood by you as being closer to the American "r". 

So, basically, it's not them. It's you. 

The failures of math education

Last year, I was invited to participate in a panel on STEM careers, where my fellow panelists and I were posed this question: "I hate math. How do I get through it?" I nearly jumped out of my chair in excitement; I've fielded these questions from some of my closest friends and I was certain my fellow panelists had had the same experiences; I was really excited to hear what they had to say. But I have never been more disappointed than when I heard their replies: "Work harder." "Practice more." "Work harder AND practice more."

Of course, nothing against my fellow panelists, each of whom were accomplished scientists, mathematicians, and technology experts. Their only failing was making a singular assumption that is shared by many math educators--to assume that students don't WANT to do math, NEVER want to do math, and simply need to be encouraged to keep plugging away at the tedious, awful chore that is math so they can get to the fun stuff. Sadly, when you get a student who's run up against the same brick wall of math every year without any improvement, or worse, clarity, that's probably a safe assumption to make. But it really really really doesn't have to be this way.

Being someone who straddles the line between science and art, I'm surrounded by both math lovers and math loathers. Many of the math lovers would say they had a predilection for math from an early age (I'd put myself in this group) and just received the appropriate challenges and encouragement throughout their development. Their favorite areas of math fall all over the board (I'm big on algebra, myself). The math loathers are an interesting bunch, because many seem to all fall into a single category: people who only get geometry (and are often pretty dismissive of algebra). In other words, these are individuals who need math to be concrete.

It seems strange that algebra and geometry, two areas of math that cover the same types of functions, might generate such divisive reactions. But when you see this:

c² = 3² + 4²

Solve for c. 

But then see this: 

I'd be willing to bet you'd see a lot more people who could solve that function after seeing the triangle, because suddenly they can make sense of what that variable c is supposed to stand in for. You've taken a completely abstract concept and paired it with something concrete that students can see and understand the reasoning behind (FYI: high school math teacher Dan Meyer has a wonderful TED talk on this very concept here: Dan Meyer: Math Class Needs a Makeover). 

So my humble request of all you math (and STEM) educators out there is to PLEASE understand that there are very straightforward reasons why your students just don't get math, and forcing a single perspective on them is exclusionary and unfair, as is punishing them by having them do more homework because they aren't getting it. Your math curriculum shouldn't exclude concrete thinkers in favor of abstract thinkers for the same reason that you shouldn't exclude students of any race, color, or creed. 

I mean, duh.