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| Malaysia Primary School Girls |
Today’s guest blogger, Anne Virkki, works as a postdoctoral research scientist in the planetary radar group of the Arecibo Observatory. She is originally from Finland, received her PhD from the University of Helsinki, and soon after defending escaped the dark and cold weather to the heat of Puerto Rico.
In the last AAS Division for Planetary Science meeting in October I joined the Women in Planetary Science lunch and discussion event. We discussed the small number of women in many of the spacecraft science teams as well as editorial boards of scientific journals and even smaller numbers of women from the different ethnic minorities. I find the event useful but felt that the discussion never got into the very core of the problem or practical actions on how to tackle it.
What we did discuss was the unconscious bias, but mainly on the level of employers choosing the future employees and how to make everyone included at the work places.
However, a gender bias exists in the lives of many of us from a much earlier stage; it is a legacy carried by parents and teachers to children in societies where conservatism lives strong. The elders conserve the gender roles they learned from their own elders as values they either consciously or unconsciously pass on to their children: Girls should be seen but not heard, boys are better in mathematics and technology than girls, girls should learn to knit and cook and clean while boys should learn handiness like fixing the car or other “traditional forms” of engineering. For many families these stereotypes are fortunately history but for many others they are very present up to this day, and will affect the career choice of the children.
