I didn't know that it was a girl-boy thing. I just knew at that time that it was not fair. It's not a gender issue. It's a human rights issue. It's not fair. I couldn't advocate for myself at that time, and no one else seemed to notice because that was the norm. That was the way the system worked, yet, to quote somebody I have a lot or respect for, I “persisted”.
When I was about 12, my father—and fathers are incredibly influential and important in supporting young women in STEM-based pathways—who thought it was normal for girls to do math and science and had no sympathy with my struggles with physics, took me to the open house at my local university, which happened to be the University of Cambridge.
It included a visit to the world-famous British Antarctic Survey. This is a scientific research unit based at Cambridge, but it has a research station at the South Pole. I thought this was the most exciting, exotic thing that I could think of. I wanted to do this. I was naturally curious. I loved the outdoors. I wanted to be an explorer. I wanted to be a scientist.
With great excitement, I bounced up to the British Antarctic Survey rep who was manning the booth there and asked, “So, how many women do you have at the base station at the South Pole?” His rather tired response was—it has since burned into my brain—that “the environment there is very stressful for the men doing research and we don't want to add to that stress by introducing women”. I heard the slamming of a door to a potential pathway that I was interested in.
The door closed. That was it. I knew that it was not something for me, yet I persisted, because here I am. I'm the exception.
I was reminded of this experience at the British Antarctic Survey about a year ago when I was at the Ontario Science Centre to see Commander Chris Hadfield receive an award for science outreach. He told a story of seeing, as a young boy at the science centre, a piece of the moon, and at that point realized that he wanted to go into space. He wanted to be an astronaut. There was no slamming of the door for him. Nobody said to him that it's too stressful to send white men into space for that all-women crew. As an aside, it'll probably be an all-women crew that goes to Mars, because of physiological reasons.
There was no slamming of the door. That pathway was wide open to him. There was nobody who said, “You don't fit and you don't look like an astronaut.” Nobody said he was the wrong colour or the wrong gender or anything. Culture and context support the dominant group. Culture and context repeatedly, over and over again, say to girls and to women that you don't fit, girls suck at math, you don't look like a scientist, and we can't have girls in the lab because they cry.
We often focus on girls as being the issue that needs attention, although data, science, and studies show that this is not the most effective way for increased participation in the absence of concomitant cultural change.
For instance, we can support girls in access to robotics through something like FIRST Robotics—my colleague there knows about that—but if we don't at the same time teach boys how to work with girls on teams in robotics, then we're not going to see a change. Those girls are still going to experience the reality that the boys ask them to do the fundraising, the boys ask them to do the marketing, and the boys won't let them do the software and the hardware or drive the robots. We have to engage everybody and not focus just on the girls.
Supporting science camps for girls makes us all feel good, and it allows corporate Canada to check their corporate responsibility box, but until we acknowledge that society has an issue—and society is sexist, racist, and homophobic—and we challenge and address that, we're not going to see significant change systemically.