Quote:
Originally Posted by nightstalker
Not many ladies .. I know thats not the case overall as there are quite a few out there.. But it always comes as a surprise to me that there is not a lot interest in astronomy from the girls .
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It's cultural....girls are generally taught not to pursue science as it's "not their style"...too hard....too nerdy and what would they want with it in the first place. Many boys are discouraged from it too...too nerdy and hard (many just don't have the smarts to do it anyway), yet when you look at the top 1-2% of the students in science at schools many of them are girls. Society doesn't expect young women to take up science as a career, so they generally follow that trend. It's not that they can't do it, it's that they're not encouraged to do it....for the most part they're actively discouraged. You can also blame the media and the education system for that.
A huge example of what happens when science is looked upon as being something weird and esoteric is the US. You only have to look at their acceptance of all this ultraconservative religious nonsense they're trying to ram down student's throats as "literal truth"...."Creation Science" etc, to see what I mean. Their retention rates in science courses is woeful as is their standards of science teaching. What makes this even worse is that the idiots out here in Oz are following their lead!!!!. To a certain extent. It's crept into universities over there, let's hope it gets nowhere fast out here. I hope our more pragmatic and less gullible natures in Oz manages to weed this nonsense out, or at least confine to the very fringes of education and society.