Social Antimobility Chair

This special edition is brought to you courtesy of somebody who ought to know better than to say what she said, someone who then doubled down on a harmful stance.

We’re having a tizzy in the UK over what Katharine Birbalsingh, head of the Michaela Community School in north-west London and chair of the Social Mobility Commission which advises UK government, told the Science and Technology Committee of MPs in Parliament about diversity in science. She said:

Physics isn’t something girls tend to fancy – they don’t want to do it, they don’t like it. It wouldn’t be something here that they don’t choose because they feel it’s not for them, that would certainly not be the case, and it wouldn’t be the case here that they wouldn’t choose it because they didn’t have a good physics teacher.

I just think they don’t like it. There’s a lot of hard maths in there that I think that they would rather not do, and that’s not to say that there isn’t hard stuff to do in biology and chemistry. [….]

We’re certainly not out there campaigning for more girls to do physics; we wouldn’t do that and I wouldn’t want to do that because I don’t mind that there’s only 16% of them taking [it], I want them to do what they want to do.

In answer to criticism, she later added:

My guess is that our girls who haven’t chosen to do physics and instead chose biology and chemistry is that they don’t want to do the hard maths in physics.

I vividly remember the high school guidance counselor who refused to let me take a class in computer programming. Having access to such a class was unusual back then. I pointed out that I loved science, especially physics, and I might need to write computer programs someday for scientific work. She sneered at me and said I would never write any software. I might get someone else to write software for me.

That is how the attitudes of people like Birbalsingh emerge and turn young people away from what could be the very thing they are best suited for in life.

In my case, soon after that session with the guidance counselor, I was named a National Merit Scholar. There were only two of us in my year. The previous year there had been a handful. I shamelessly used the award to wrestle the guidance counselor into letting me take the programming class. Basically, if she kept standing in my way, I would go public about her refusal to let a National Merit Scholar go to the programming class.

What if I hadn’t done so well the day we took the test that determined who got that status? Would I have taken as much computer-related study at university as I did? Would I have transitioned from test engineering to information technology at the Space Center? Would I have become expert in some of the most demanding IT work (large complex near-realtime mission critical systems, operating systems, database engines…)?

As a young child, I wasn’t naturally as good at mathematics as I was with language. My parents recognized that I loved science. They realized that to go into science, I would need to be good at mathematics. Unlike Birbalsingh, they understood that even so-called “soft” sciences need math to crunch statistics. They (especially my mother) made me work at it until my standardized test scores in mathematics rose to meet my language scores.

That in turn allowed me to pursue whatever most caught my interest as I reached high school and then university. For the most part, I could study what interested me instead of shaping my schedule around a big hole in my preparation.

At university, I took more mathematics courses than required. I enjoyed most of them. I took physics, but my thought patterns are too concrete for quantum mechanics, so I swerved into engineering. It was the way things work, science, mathematics and practicality, all in one bundle.

My entire professional life would never have existed without my parents’ encouragement to not believe I had to stay in a box labeled for girls and women… and the good fortune of getting the leverage I needed to make the guidance counselor stand aside.

Birbalsingh chairs the Social Mobility Commission. She stands in the way of girls who fancy physics in the UK. Everyone who consciously or subconsciously shares her attitude stands in the way. Boys can just study the material. Girls have to study the material and also come up with the heft to get past the Birbalsinghs holding them back.

I’m not asking anyone to “campaign” to get more girls to study physics or other hard science or engineering. Just get out of the damned way.