Jessica Wade: belief

Transcript context

…But can’t some of it just be legitimate preference? I don’t think it’s biological. I think it’s because of the way you were taught and introduced to it at school, or the passions and enthusiasms even of your parents. If you sit around your kitchen table every night, and you’re like, “Ah, mom, I’ve got physics and maths homework.” And your mom’s like, “I’ve always hated physics and maths,” then you, as a young woman, are like, “Oh, well, my mum hates it, so I’m going to hate it.” Whereas boys, because they’re always taught that these are subjects that will give you huge opportunity and are really exciting, and all these successful men are going on to do them, they just do them anyway. I think that you see it as being a preference because of the way that society and family has really centered around this fact that girls don’t study subjects like physics and engineering. Whereas if you gave them all the same opportunity, if we had amazing teachers in schools, if parents were a little less biased about the subjects they do and don’t find exciting, I think you’d just see that go. In the UK, we have mandatory high school studying of chemistry to get in for medicine. If you want to go to medical school, you’ve got to do chemistry, and you’d probably do biology as well. As a result, chemistry undergraduate is gender balanced because girls start studying chemistry at high school, and they’re like, “This is an awesome subject, so I’ll go and do it at university.” If you made physics a mandatory subject for studying medicine, you’d have way more women studying physics undergraduate because they’d realize this is an awesome subject to do. It’s much more about the advice we’re giving people rather than biological preference towards a particular subject. Is it 0 percent preference?…

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