Quote:
Originally Posted by popnbrown
3 out of 4 examples you give above, the actor is not the girl.
We fix the first 3 (involving the environment - which includes the place, the people, the things she interacts with), the 4th will come.
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Actually my call is for all of us to a) watch for it in ourselves and b) call it out when someone in our lives does something crappy like this. These things are done by ordinary people all of the time, both male and female, by our families, our friends and ourselves. When it crops up, it's subtle and subconscious with plausible deniability but it's there. The most constructive thing each of us can do is examine our own behavior critically. That's the one person each of us can definitely control.
I do not share your confidence that girls will simply feel secure enough to be assertive and direct if you remove other people's crappy behavior, unless you're writing off girls who have already been conditioned to not be. This is something that starts early in life. Removing the cause does not undo the damage. You would not believe the amount of self-censoring that many girls and women go through.
Somehow I feel obliged to clarify that I am a woman who has been in STEM nearly my whole life. I just realized my user profile wouldn't indicate that.