Esports seen as pathway to boost diversity in STEM careers

So let me get this straight Blacks and Hispanic only look up to "sports" figures So more Black and Hispanic top players will bring more Black and Hispanic into science.

So by that backwards thinking more Black and Hispanic should be into designing a creating better sports equipment, and they aren't.

As for girls.

As a father of a girl that is in STEM (masters in AI computer science).

She keeps going on about how the women talking about video games not being what girls want or STEM males being anti female, these women are 90% social science meaning the are not in science and Don't understand the girls that are into games, programming, etc...are into the exact same strange things as the boys.

My daughter's female friends are like her, rejected by the majority of women outcasts. The nerd, STEM males have no problem, 90% of the bullying came for girls and women.

STEM students are usually (but not exclusively) geeky/nerdy/aspie. The brain wiring goes with the passion for coding. Even with absolute equality, I doubt you'd get more than 20% female, as guys seem to be more likely to have their brains wired like that.

Over the past decade, around 1% of midwives have been male. There doesn't seem to be quite as much of a fuss about that, nor quite as much effort and cash being put into changing it.

There has always been a problem with geeks writing software (including games) for geeks. That's not so much a gender issue as a management and product design/development issue.

STEM is a broad field. The 20% figure is for coding. Science and medicine in general will have a higher figure.

GBR48

Today 11:38 am JST

There has always been a problem with geeks writing software (including games) for geeks. That's not so much a gender issue as a management and product design/development issue.

My geek/otaku daughter pointed out that every female lead project to try and make girls interested in STEM have been lead by non STEM women or STEM women no one in the STEM fields especially gaming like. So basically women that geeks male and female cannot stand.

My daughter read an article saying game developers needed to create more female characters.

But the girls that game like the same characters as the boys, you could create 10,000 female characters but unless they gave something really special the same more popular characters male or female will be used but girls and boys.

It is a wiring in the brain thing, why else would my daughter when in Jr high school like algorithms and think it was fun to play around with them my son's eyes and mine would glaze over as she could go on for hours telling us geek stuff.

I was taking STEM from the age of 12 in the early 1960s. Pre-electronic calculators. Used a slide rule. Went on to become a measurement and control engineer. In the college class of 30, only one was a female. More joined later and met more females in STEM. When I worked in an analysing lab has a microscopist there were more females than males. The pay and conditions were always very good.

My godson is studying Esports and coding at uni.

Governments don't care about equality and never have. They have an incorrect belief that women are a vast untapped mine of tech staff and that if they can press the magic geek button, they can ban foreign migrant workers in tech (esp. internet security), replacing them with their newly minted female geek army. Like Brexit economics, that is a fantasy.

Yes, you will get more women into STEM subjects, but in some areas you will never get numerical parity.

Anyone can build apps nowadays with an app builder. It's digital Lego and kids of all genders and races are doing it in school. This offers access and opportunity to those who might want to consider coding in future. But it isn't coding (and neither is gaming). Coding in tough - it's like learning a complex logical language. You have to be fluent in it to use it, and its use is limited. It's a huge investment. And often time-limited in value, as usage changes. Your brain needs to be wired in the right way to even want to do it. You will always get more blokes than women wanting to do it. Just as millions of women drive, but only 5% of mechanics are women. It's not all prejudice.

Be honest about this. Not everyone is going to want to write code and not everyone is going to have the skill set. You cannot and should not force people to do it, just to even up the numbers. What we should do is offer access and opportunity, and then see what we get. The schemes mentioned will do that, but lose the political/activist BS and be honest. Geeks are rare and should be properly valued for their skills. And if you chuck out foreign IT skills (and foreign IT) as Brexit Britain has chucked out farm labourers, you will simply damage your own economy and society for fake, nationalist reasons.