Why Maker Faire Matters
hackeducation.com
hackeducation.com
But there was one thing I thought a little odd: there were a bunch of girls under 10. And there were a fair number of women in their mid-20s and thirties. But there were very few teenage girls.
I wonder why this is, particularly since a bunch of studies have shown that the teenage years are when STEM fields lose the bulk of girls that have expressed an early interest in them. I remember that when I was captain of the math team in high school, I had to do a fair bit of recruiting to round up participants for math competitions. The twelve year old girls would enthusiastically participate. At thirteen, if they were remotely popular, you could forget about it. Oftentimes they remained exceptionally good at math (some are working for large tech companies now, 10+ years later), but they refused to do anything that would show how good they were at math to their peer group.
Why? And how can we make it so that STEM pursuits aren't just something your dad teaches you when nobody's looking, but can actually be pretty cool among your peer group too?
Priorities shift because teenagers (both boys and girls) engage in activities that younger kids don't: self-organized socialization, especially dating. To spend time on these things, they have to give up time somewhere else. I don't think we can fight this, but we might be able to redirect it a little (give up that instead of this) or possibly even usurp it by providing an alternative to "the mall" as the place to hang out and BS.
Social pressures can be changed, but it's incredibly hard. It might be easier to instead work around them. Girls don't want to be seen engaging in STEM pursuits? Sure, the ideal answer would be to change teenage culture so that this social pressure is reversed. Good luck with that. It would probably be easier and more effective to instead proivde a way for teenage girls who want to continue to pursue their interest in STEM to do so without compromising their carefully curated social personas.
Is anyone aware of a similar event, but with more focus on things like chip vendor booths, demo pits for hardware projects, and a heavier hacker culture?
BTW, both TechShop and Hacker Dojo were at Maker Faire, as were a number of other area organizations that make cool things.