Posted September 23, 2015
LeonardoCornejo: Ironic, my sister, who is younger than me, is a robotics engineer, and I am in literary studies. Even funnier is that I was expected to become an entomologyst, and she was expected to be an english teacher or a vet.
RWarehall: And I think that also displays the issue. Why were those the expectations in the first place? And we haven't even really addressed the issue of whether expected gender roles themselves are a necessarily bad thing. Is it so wrong that certain jobs tend to favor one sex as long as there is no real barrier to the other joining the profession? I'm just using this more of an example, but why aren't these things part of any discussion of women as game programmers? Instead all the discussion seems to be about some illusionary wall put up by the patriarchy...
the thing is, those expectations were not built out of a stereotype, but of the interests we used to show as children. I do have a fascination with invertebrates and nature in general, and my sister loves pets and has skill at teaching. The thing is, as time passed I began to hate mathmatics and I have a sesitive nose. My sister on the other hand also liked robots, and she began to feel more interest for that as time passed. Basically it had little to do with gender roles, and more with what we liked and how much we liked it as we grew up. My sister constantly complains of how people believe her gender makes it harder for her to be in a STEM field even though that is not true, and actually she has found it easier because people are desperate to not look sexist so they don't push her as much as the males.