Today the Interactive Media Products semester started off with twenty-four students, 23 male and 1 female. When I worked as teamleader of the Human Technology programme in The Hague I once went to a meeting, somewhere in an industrial area in Maarssen, that was organized by an organization that strived for more women in science and engineering. What I learned was that basically everybody wants more women in science and engineering but nobody knows how, and the girls just don’t want it. The problem already starts in high-school in the third grade, when girls (and boys) have to choose a ‘profile’. Many girls do not choose the “Nature and Technology” profile. Some choose “Nature and Health”, but most do not choose Nature at all. If they choose Nature and Health they think of choosing a career in health-care, mayby studying medicin, or speech pathology, or perhaps even biology. But not engineering. Girls are not attracted to anything that starts with Technology in the header. (Lot’s of boys aren’t either - absolutely speaking there are not many people studying in the exact sciences anyway). Why is this so?

It is inborn.

It is conditioned right from the cradle.

It is both.

I don’t really know. What I do know is that the girls that *do* want to study technology *don’t* wish to be associated with girly topics. So all the attempts to make technology courses that appeal more to the ‘human’ side of things - as if that would then attract more women, don’t seem to work. Either you want to be in health-care, or you want to be a programmer, but being a girl that likes programming doesn’t predict you being particularly interested in programming social websites for independent living seniors in an e-care project. 

Or do the women readers of this weblog, that also happen to be in a science / engineering department, think differently?

I would still like to attract more women to the course. But how to do it? I already cut out the word technology in the header. Interactive. Media. Products. What should I do next?

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