What do you want to be when you grow up?
At D’s end of the kindergarten year ceremony, the kids performed a little song about all the things they had learned during the year, and were each called upon to say what they want to be when they grow up.
D wants to be a scientist who builds rovers. He explained that a rover is a kind of robot that goes to other planets and if anything bad happens to the rover, it means you can’t send people. (Yes, the Mars imax movie did make an impression on him, why do you ask?)
Of the other kids in the class who didn’t totally mumble their answers, the choices were:
- a soldier who drives a truck (said with truck driving action)
- a football player
- air force (said with plane flying action, which looks a lot like truck driving action)
- nurse (said with a simpering "Doctor, here are your instruments")
- ballerina (said with a pirouette)
- a cheerleader (said with a jump)
- a cheerleader (also said with a jump).
I found this intensely depressing. Yes, I know they’re 6 years old, and "when I grow up" is further away than "once upon a time." But it felt like they’re pulling from an awfully limited deck. I don’t know; maybe I wouldn’t have felt so strongly about the exact same answers coming from a middle-class group of kids.
I think my dad still has hanging in his office the drawing I did when I was about that age of the different tools that a doctor uses, labeled in an adult hand, but clearly to my dictation (it says things like "this is the pointy part that shoots out.") And no, I’m not a doctor. But it was within the realm of what I could imagine.
Laura at Geeky Mom has a series of posts up about why she’s not a scientist. There’s a lot of good evidence that girls tend not to take the prerequisite courses math and science in high school, shutting off options before they’ve really considered them. That wasn’t me.
In high school, I took calculus, Honors Bio, AP Chemistry (you had to dissect a cat in AP Bio, and that really wasn’t something I wanted to do.) And then I went to college, and took the minimum 3 classes in hard math and science needed to graduate. I was still interested in the topics, but where in HS I could take math and history and English and French and a science and economics and still have room for pottery, in college, you couldn’t take more than 4 or 5 classes a term. And the introductory level science classes were notorious for being both boring and difficult. And up a hill a 15 minute walk from the rest of campus. By then I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a doctor. So I signed up for the "great books" set of humanities classes and never looked back.
June 25th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Don’t worry — A’s going to be a movie star, a ballerina, and a princess. Why? Because, she says, she’s a girl, and girls like to be princesses, and boys don’t. This is the same kid who asked me, days after her 3rd birthday, if when she was a lady she could live in an apartment by herself, without a man and without a child.
I’ve been listening recently to MIT’s OCW podcasts of its freshman chemistry lectures (taught wonderfully by Sylvia Ceyer). They’re great, and they’re free. I had a pang when I realized I’d passed up being an undergrad in those classes — Wellesley had a cross-registration arrangement, but because of a lot of strange ideas I’d had about Wellesley I’d gone somewhere else — but I also know that I’d have been lost in the first ten minutes, if I’d been a freshman at these lectures. Didn’t have the prep for them, and I don’t think I had the abstract/quantitative abilities at the time to’ve done the prep anyway. Anyway. I’m not sorry I went to social sciences & then arts, but it’s possible, later, to go back to science.
June 26th, 2007 at 5:51 am
my six-year-old (girl) intends to be a cheerleader. my ten-year-old intends to play professional sports, maybe soccer – though I think he is finally hearing my ‘many are called, few are chosen’ line about that. neither has any real idea what my, or their mother’s, work entails. I think they will come around, and get a broader view of what’s possible. and these are kids in a school where the parent community is heavily lawyers, dentists, accountants, Hill staff, military officers, with an occasional decorator, cop, and one glorious hold-out elevator mechanic who has lived here forever.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:45 am
My son said “I want to be a daddy” in his class – which I found difficult (my husband is a SAHD). If he had been a girl, and I had been a SAHM, I would have been horrified, but as it was, I found it sweet (with the thought that I should have been horrified). Up on the walls in their very middle class class (they got to take turns being “star of the week” which meant that they answered questions about themselves) it was mostly train drivers, astronauts, nurses, ballerinas, and yes, a few mummies (sorry mommies) as well.
But now a year later my son wants to be a spy, moonlighting as an archeologists, with ten children who will be looked after by the grandparents. So we didn’t totally shut off his sense of the world outside by having a stay at home parent look after him.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:02 am
I find it interesting how focused we are on vocation in the States. At dinner parties, question #2 or 3 or always, What do you do? And for kids, already at 6 we’re asking about future work life. And note it’s not phrased as “what work will you do” but rather “who do you want to be”. Is it healthy, this propensity to consider one’s profession to be one’s identity? Or is it just reality? It certainly explains why career changes can be so fraught for adults.
(This BTW I at least consider an improvement over the constant “Who are you going to marry?” questions I always got as a girl.)
June 26th, 2007 at 9:21 am
I still remember being in first grade and our class was all drawing pictures of what they wanted to be when they grew up. I was shy and didn’t fit in well already. All the girls had said they wanted to be housewives when they grew up, so that’s what I put too, in reality at the time I wanted to be a dentist, but I still remember being terrified of actually telling anyone that.
Luckily as I grew older I never let the shy, socially akwardness get in the way of what I wanted to do. I maxxed out on all the science and math classess offered at my high school and was taking college chemistry my senior year of high school. Currently I work as a chemical engineer and I’m so happy after elementary school I never worried about “what all the other girls are doing”. I don’t know how to prevent it but I never want my kids, male or female, to feel like they can’t do something they want to do.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:30 am
I get unreasonably irritated at these “what do you want to grow up” questions aimed at very young children, but can’t articulate why at the moment. However, I will say that Mr. Blue would be absolutely delighted to play Mars Rover with D. the next time we see you. We loved that IMAX movie around here, too.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:00 am
And note it’s not phrased as “what work will you do” but rather “who do you want to be”. Is it healthy, this propensity to consider one’s profession to be one’s identity? Or is it just reality?
You can blame the Calvinist (Protestant) work ethic for that one. Work, in America, is the very expression of personhood. Which is why it is so incredibly devastating to be laid off. It’s not just a financial hardship, it’s the evisceration of your entire identity.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Hmm…the first para was a quote from Jen’s comment above, but the italics got stripped out.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:48 am
I’ve been reading Laura’s “why I am not a scientist” series (and the comments) and can’t shake the feeling that a significant part of the answer (yours, too, Elizabeth), is that it’s just too hard.
I don’t think that science is intellectually too difficult for girls. But, I think girls are dropping out (more frequently than boys) when science is challenging because they aren’t taught to persevere through challenges the way boys are. We’ve talked about this in other contexts (girl’s desires for praise, the work of Carol Dweck).
Why is science hard? Sometimes it might be ’cause it’s taught badly. But, I also think it’s truly intellectually challenging, and unlike intellectual challenge in writing or comprehending text, it’s obvious to the learner that they’re not getting it. Writing well is really hard, too, but I think that it’s more difficut to tell that you’re not doing it well, then it is to tell that you’re not solving the math problem, or that the you don’t understand the Kreb’s cycle.
I don’t this problem is the only cause. When you watch a mars rover movie, and all the scientists are men, that has an affect on the girls, too. When very few scientists are women, and everyone assumes that a woman isn’t a scientist (or at least a capable one), that has an effect, too. When teachers assume a girl won’t be interested, that’s a problem. I read in the NYT that Larry Summers admits that he should not have said that there may be so few women scientists, because they aren’t intellectually capable. He doesn’t admit that he’s wrong about the statement, but he admits he shouldn’t have said it, because the girls all heard him say “you can’t do science).
I will admit that I’m taking the criticism of science faculty a little personally (that we’re loosing women, because we’re not teaching science right). I am a scientist and a woman and a teacher of those classes that all of you weren’t willing to take in college (not really, since I don’t usually teach lower division classes for non-scientists, but my colleages are, and I could be one of those faculty). I won’t argue that we teach those classes perfectly (and some of you may even have been taught inadequately). But, I hope that bad teaching is a major part of the problem why girls, rather than boys, drop out of science (except for the challenge in general — it’s definitely more difficult to learn when teachers are bad).
bj
June 26th, 2007 at 11:52 am
urgh, boy, that set of paragraphs was an pretty good example of how writing can be bad and not obviously noticeable to the writer, wasn’t it? Sorry for the typos and mis-statements.
I hope, of course, that bad teaching is _not_ a major part of the problem of why boys, rather than girls drop out of science.
Now, someone see if they’re willing to post information about the Kreb’s cycle (without a google search; that’s too easy). :-).
bj
June 26th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
The Krebs cycle is how glucose is processed in cells, with the oxygen brought in by red blood cells, in order to generate energy. That’s as much as I remember, 20 years after the last bio class I took.
I don’t think the problem for me was that science was too hard. One of the 3 science classes I took was genetics, with a bunch of pre-meds, and I totally blew the curve because I understood basic probability.
But intro science classes are taught in huge lectures, and are set up as a way to dump a large number of facts into students’ heads. Intro humanities classes are generally set up as “this is how XX discipline thinks about this subject.” And at most universities these days, half the grad students who lead labs and study sections in math and science classes are international students who don’t necessarily speak English very well. I think it turns off people who don’t have a specific reason for taking a class — knowing that they want to be an engineer or a doctor. Meanwhile the “physics for poets” type classes are too watered down to actually show what scientists do either.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Like Jen and Mrs. Coulter, I have a problem with the “what do you want to be” question. It’s a selfish question. I mean, it teaches us to think selfishly about our place in the world. At least “what work do you want to do?” implies a bit of service to others.
When asking that question, adults might think they’re teaching kids to dream big, but I don’t believe that’s what happens. Instead it teaches kids which identities are worth assuming (rich, well-respected doctor) and which not (giggly cheerleader on the sidelines).
On a lighter note: my 5yo has been interested in folktales lately. After reading about John Henry, he announced, “When I grow up, I’m going to pick cotton like John Henry!” Because JH was a powerful man, and apparently powerful men pick cotton.
June 26th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Gee, I dunno. I’m pretty far from Protestant, but I appreciate how work forms you, and I think it’s important. Maybe because when I’m asking the question I’m asking “what do you want to -do-“, not “what do you want on a business card so that other people will know what to make of you”. Also, I like interviews, and when someone’s serious about their work they can generally talk very well about it & show you something you didn’t know. I just spent a kid’s birthday party talking to a grandfather who was a retired signalman. Told me all about going around the region putting up signals on the tracks and the problems they ran into. And yesterday, on the radio, there was a South Dakota milkman talking about what he did, how he ran his route in icebox days. In fact I’ve learned to be a little wary of people who genuinely dislike talking shop, especially if they’re in some professional line of work. In my experience it means they don’t really like their own work, but haven’t found other work. It seems to mean that something’s gone wrong, and it comes out in other ways too. I won’t forget the Swiss math kid I met at my bookstore near Brown, either. Serious kid. He disliked math and used to come read novels, asked good questions. I asked him once why he was doing math instead of writing, and he shrugged like he was about 70 years old and said he was very good at it. I have no doubt he was. I bet too that he’s figured out a way of using it for something and doing more congenial work.
Something underappreciated is how remoldable people are, I think. I loved Harry Angstrom’s printer father in the Rabbit books, but it was painful to read, because I’d gotten into publishing just as conventional typesetting was on its way out. So wherever I went, typesetters were getting fired, and these were serious craftspeople who’d been at it for decades. I’m sure some still miss the feel of the tools and the rubies and all the rest, but it’s funny how fast people move along to the next thing if they’re good at working.
June 26th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I also think there’s more to it than simple Protestant work ethic. In my daily life I know many people who don’t work all that hard. What about the sales people who pride themselves on their ‘golf Fridays’? No one cares as long as their sales numbers are good. This to me is an upending of the Protestant work ethic which holds that the effort is important, not necessarily the results.
Whatever’s behind it, I’m as much a victim as anyone. I put way too much of my identity into work of various types. My way of supporting any cause is to do work for it. (That’s how I ended up coordinating Sunday School, god help me.) And frankly it’s made me a semi-crappy parent … always subconsciously viewing the kids as the ‘work product’ of my personal life, things that can be improved with just a couple more music lessons or better-balanced meals. In my saner moments I know better. But the addiction to achievement often drowns this out and leads me to push them too much.
June 26th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
I’ll have to find out more about how introductory science classes are taught at my university. I know in my own field that our graduate students (who speak english) TA the introductory classes. I don’t know what the situation is for science and math out of my field. I still think a big part of what drives people out is difficulty & linearity (i.e. you can’t space out and then expect to catch up); science really is a tower — if you don’t do the introductory class (even if it’s boring), you’re locked out of the stuff that comes after.
I think I said “you too” about your choice not to take more science in college on the unwillingness to walk up the hill (which probably isn’t your fault, but the fault of everyone who segregates science on one side of the hill). It’s unfortunate that we allow science to be segregatd from society. Your story sounds more like the fact that one individual can’t do everything. We all have to choose at some point.
Most scientists are snobby enough not to consider doctors scientists (doctors:science is like lawyers:humanities).
bj
PS: pretty good on the Kreb’s cycle. The only caveat is that the oxygen is not used by the Kreb’s cycle, but is used by another step to recycle components required by the Kreb’s cycle. But, that’s a quibble. This requires googling: The OSU marching band “doing” the Kreb’s cycle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgXnH087JIk. I love it when people mix science with everything.
June 26th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgXnH087JIk
why doesn’t the other link work?
bj
June 26th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
I attended graduate school in math and am now an actuary. In both I have had to make extra efforts to fight the loneliness that I can feel as a woman. This was not my experience, but I wonder how many undergraduates are picking up on this earlier than I did and choosing other fields.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Mira (5) wants to be a mother to boy-girl twins. I’m not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse than if she said she wanted to be a princess or a cheerleader…
June 26th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
My 3 year old daughter walks around telling anyone and everyone that she wants to be a doctor like her daddy. I am a teacher and she completely shuns the option. People think this is cute and don’t take her too seriously. I usually ask kids what activities they are involved with rather than what they want to be when they grow up. My college students don’t even know and some are adults changing careers.
I find it unsettling that in our society we define ourselves through work. I would love to branch out into other areas, but I find alot of people are unable to see people in different roles. The pressure for success within one role is severe.
One thing I find humorous is that as an artist I solely view DaVinci as an artist and second, inventor. Friends and even Baby Einstein view him as a scientist. There are so many people today living the renaissance man/woman role.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
bj, I think it’s more than that, though last I checked, the undergrad numbers in bio, biochem, and chem were pretty good for women; I think it was in grad school where the pipeline leak started, but maybe I’m remembering that wrong. Anyway. Here are factors I can think of for not choosing science:
1. Material is hard and abstract, sometimes without helpful metaphors connecting it to everyday experience;
2. Very little fudge factor — not possible to talk your way out of a bad test situation;
3. Tremendous amounts of homework compared with other subjects, except engineering;
4. If you fail to understand something basic, you’re toast. No simple ways of sidestepping;
5. Course progression leaves little freedom to explore other subjects;
6. Specifically about women’s participation: Despite programs designed to mitigate this — and despite a genuine, if naive, egalitarianism on the part of many male scientists — the atmosphere can be overwhelmingly, stereotypically male: awkward about expressed emotion, a lot of king-of-mountain stuff about who’s smartest, general suck-it-up attitude about work hours, and all the other things that seem to lead to women’s attrition on the tenure track.
I’m talent-free in the lab (klutz who doesn’t pay attention, not all that sparky intellectually with the chem either), so this isn’t something I’ve had to really worry about, but I was also bothered by the fear of looking stupid. I kept watching people say nothing for fear of accidentally saying something stupid or wrong, or, God help you, whimsical. This is diametrically opposed to my experience in theatre, and while the quiet can be nice, I think you lose something that way. Maybe young women feel some of that too, and decide they don’t want to be in an environment where the penalties are so steep for exposing yourself as not-smart.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
I think my problem with science was due in large part to how it was taught. My dad is a chemical engineer and a lifelong naturalist, gardener, animal-lover, and I’ve learned much more from him than I ever did in a classroom, because it was never about formulas and memorization. We took walks, went to planetariums, planted flowers, looked for cardinals in the backyard, you know?
When I was in college, I took two semesters of “physics for poets” with a really great teacher, a retired physicist (Joel Sinsky), who was one of the best teachers I ever had, in any subject, because he was so truly fired up about the subject! He was full of biographical tidbits, anecdotes, stories of experiments, and an incredible range of information. I got As in both his courses and absolutely loved it. I’ve also absorbed more info about science from biographies of scientists that I ever did in classes. The conceptual aspect is much easier for me to understand than the formulas and calculations.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Yeah, Jackie, except that sometimes without seeing the math it’s tough to understand the metaphors and concepts, or — to put it another way — to say why things are this way and not some other way. The physicist can make the metaphors because he understands the relationships that are made plain in the math, but it’s dangerous for a science writer like me to do that, because I don’t have that understanding, and it’s very easy to make a misleading or incorrect metaphor or analogy.
This OCW course is being helpful to me in that regard. It starts with some physical chemistry, and while it’s plain that at this level no one is expected to have enough math to see where the expressions are really coming from, you can see the direction and begin to see things like what electrons are and why they’re not in the nuclei. And it’s put together smart, too. Just as I was listening today and thinking “Oh crap, how am I going to use this? Most of the time when I’m writing about molecules they’re big, they’re biomolecules, who cares about the shielding for individual electrons, and besides I can’t calculate that anyway for some monster enzyme,” I realized oh yeah, they’ve set the course up in a way that answers the problem. A protein chemist teaches the second half of the course.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
(oops) to the physical biochemists out there, yes, I know, the shielding is important. Honest.
June 28th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
i find it interesting the list of reasons given for why women don’t become scientists, starting with: the material is difficult. in school i always found it to be the exact opposite – math & science seemed as natural as breathing, and fun to explore, but it all made sense, and that was comforting to me.
humanities on the other hand – we were always being told to write papers! and i hate writing, to this day i find it v. v. difficult. so it’s all about what one finds difficult isn’t it?
anyway, getting back to the original post and the disparities between what the children are dreaming for themselves, i have a huge rant stored up in me about infant & toddler clothing. (if i liked to write, it might actually come out somewhere). the gist of it is that i’m glad i have a little boy, because if i had a little girl, i would either be extremely p&ssed off about the choices available in clothing, or i would dress her in boys clothes.
here’s my highly subjective and biased list:
cool things that baby/toddler girls get to wear on their clothes:
rainbows, butterflies, ladybugs, flowers, kitty cats, ponies, sparklies, the color purple. (i hate pink & i hate princess so those are right out, eliminating apprimately 90% of all baby girl clothing. unicorns are annoying too)
cool things that baby/toddler boys get to wear on their clothes:
every other animal, living or extinct,in the animal kingdom except the 4 listed above.
any and all sports.
any and all mechanical objects, including but not limited to: bicycles, cars, trucks, taxis, trains, airplanes, space ships, construction equipment.
anything to do with nature, hiking, forests, mountains, jungles (see above concerning wild animals) (exceptions: rainbows & flowers).
anything and everything to do with astronomy, moons, planets, stars, rocket ships (see above concerning mechanical equipment)….
i think i’m making my point. i love flowers, rainbows, butterflies, cats, horses, and sparklies and occasionally regret that my little boy is missing out on those on his clothing (if he pays any attention which at 14months i don’t think he does) but still. i think he’s making out way better.
and we wonder why there are no women scientists? we’re starting in the cradle, with the indoctrination. i’m serious.
June 28th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Trishka – I agree with you wholeheartedly on the clothing issues. I feel like designing a clothing line for girls with images everything you stated. Society tells girls you can be whatever you want, but in reality what children are exposed to give sometimes stronger messages.
June 29th, 2007 at 12:25 am
Yeah, mom of girl here. Mom who isn’t girly herself, dislikes pink/purple, blah blah blah. Dressed girl in truck jumpers, giraffes, NASAwear, constellation T-shirts, etc. Let me tell you how it makes no difference. I now have a child who defines everything as “for girls” or “for boys”; rejects anything that is not pink, purple, sparkly, princesses, or a pony; wants lipstick and is waiting for her boobies to grow; wants tap shoes; you get the idea. For the last year she’s lobbied for a jewelry box with a spinning ballerina on it. (This will be the birthday present.) She spends about 20-25 hours a week in the company of other small children whose mothers are about as girly as I am.
And the thing is, I remember being that way too. I remember with great fondness my Tinkerbell sparkly cosmetic set. My Alice In Wonderland watch with the blue leather strap, patent leather Mary Janes, sheer-tutu pink ballerina nightgown, Capezios, peignoir set, etc. I wanted to wear dresses every day, the frillier the better. Fast-forward 35 years to hairy barefaced woman in a 20-year-old sweatshirt looking up what else is in that manganese dioxide powder in the middle of heavy-duty batteries. When she’s not watching depressing foreign movies that feature neither girls’ nights out nor weddings.
And no, I don’t think anymore that it’s socialization that makes the 2- and 3-year-old boys attack each other and roar. I know these boys’ parents, and they’re not out there trying to get the boys manly. Some of the parents are lesbian couples who are very, very tired. Some are single mothers who are also very, very tired and entertain thoughts of selling the boys, sometimes, because they really aren’t in the mood for surprise head-butting attacks anymore.
About the material being hard — this is the main reason most people, male and female, stay away. I think it’s hard too. One of the funny frustrations I have in studying chem is a sense that it’s taken me nearly 40 years to make my way into the 20th century and all its intangibles.
June 29th, 2007 at 2:01 am
I think you’re right that there’s something a little sad, sinister even, about a society that asks small children what job they want to hold when they’re older. But, as others have pointed out, there’s also something realistic about it. If most adults in our culture spend 8+ hours a day doing something, that is a value judgment of sorts: in some way, we must find our jobs important. Mostly, though, I think people ask little kids this question because of the funny answers kids give. We all know that there are more accountants than ballerinas, and it’s a relief to see that kids aren’t yet aware of that, I suppose.
On the science issue, I obviously can’t say what stops other women from entering the sciences, but speaking for myself: both of my parents are scientists, and most of their friends are scientists, including most of their friends who are women. Also, most of their grad students have been women, many of whom have families and full lives outside of their work. So it never occurred to me that science was unfriendly to women, or that it would require some kind of great sacrifice of my personal life. Growing up I was both good at science and enjoyed it. The thing is, I enjoyed other subjects more. For that simple reason I decided on a PhD in a humanities field. The field I’m in requires a lot of technical knowledge (several languages and a great deal of translation work), so I don’t think it’s a matter of the “subjectivity of being wrong” in the humanities. Personal preference is a powerful thing, and it seems so routinely discounted in discussions of women in the sciences.