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But this isn't just about the impact on girls. Think about what we tell our boys.
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We tell them that they should be sitting quietly at a desk for eight hours at a time. When they find they can't easily do that, we tell them they are defective and give them drugs to help them accomplish it. Then, at the end of their secondary education, they go to college at a lower rate than the girls.
This is where we are now. I dunno if it's similar in Yorkshire.
It's weird this insistence on equality of outcome. From my experience it has been a mixed bag.
I graduated three decades ago with a comp sci degree, and over 1/3rds of comp sci majors were women. At that time, in education, there was deep concern that women weren't entering STEM fields. So girls were urged to enter those fields. Today 30 years later, 1/4 of comp sci majors are women.
Right. It went down. In an era when more women go to college, fewer of them go for comp sci. In an era when the M/F ratio in MED school is about 52/48, the ratio in comp sci dropped. In a huge way.
I believe this is a true M/F brain difference; I think it goes across cultures. It's not that girls can't do programming as well as boys. It's that they have preferences, and like many other preferences, they are established before birth. Before society even has a chance to get to them.
If there are brain differences, the worst thing we could do to boys and girls is tell them there are not. The best thing we could do is show that these differences exist and then to educate them about prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping, so that any judging that happens works on an individual basis.
The WORST thing we could do is shoehorn people into professions they don't actually enjoy because we have decided that equality is the only thing that matters.
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." - Aristotle