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mithawk: I don't see her omission from Kranz's book as anything insidious. Rather, the guidance officer and the computer expert advising him at Mission Control were from NASA. The software developers would have stayed behind at MIT.

As for the discrepancies on the respective Wikipedia pages, it looks to me like Hal wrote the specific routines that provided the vital workload management functions that kept Eagle from crashing, so credit is due to him. Margaret Hamilton was the director of the entire software team, so credit also devolves to her, particularly because it's unlikely that Hal's routines were developed entirely in a bubble, with no idea exchange, feedback, suggestions, or testing/debugging/validation support from other members of the team.

And as usual, there are other team members who are being deprived of their due credit here.

Many people whose job title is not "programmer", "developer", or "software engineer" do a lot of programming. If your daughter learned some programming, likes it, and is taking that skill to some other field, her leaving computer science may not be a loss. I never took a programming class in college or grad school, and had only a course in BASIC in high school, but I have been able to do jobs that require programming. Lots of financial traders have hacked together VBA scripts for Excel, having never programmed before. Nowadays many use Python, R, and Matlab as well.

Males are more overconfident than females, but both sexes tend to overestimate their abilities. Looking at http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/gjfw827qts/tabs_OPI_intelligence_20140502.pdf , 24% and 15% of males and females think they are much more intelligent than average, and only 0% and 1% think they are much less intelligent. The survey is reported on in America the intelligent . Females' greater realism about their abilities may cause them to work harder and earn more college degrees than males do.

The thing is, you've given the impression in the past that maybe females are under-represented in STEM fields because they have less innate talent in those areas.

The data from that study I quoted indicated that, on what was studied (scientific reasoning skills), females performed equally to males, but underrated their abilities.

This study appears to provide evidence that "females have less STEM talent" may not be true, but instead may be due to other reasons. Conversely, the statement "males have more STEM talent" may be due to overestimation of abilities.

Found some adorable girl's graphic t-shirts and hoodies online at Lands' End with fabulous science themes... rockets, dinosaurs, chemistry, glow-in-the-dark space designs, and elements of the periodic table spelling Ge Ni U S.

This could be a novel part of the solution: using fashion to affirm girls' interest in science.

Just checked these out - they look great!

This is where I admit that I got my daughter a pair of teeshirts for her recent birthday--

one is a Reading Rambo shirt (cut for young women, by the way), and the other was a more complex design involving a t-rex dividing by zero whilst a meteor hurls to the earth in the background.

She adores quirky/geeky teeshirts. Woot Shirts (Shirt.woot) makes a lot of things which are suitable for middle school girls, and as noted, they make them in ladies/juniors cuts so that they actually fit. Amazon often has a good selection of them.

I like the lands space end designs for my DD. I usually order more than one in her size and we give them to her little friends as birthday presents.
She and her best friend adored the dark blue one with Saturn in pink, purple and gold sequins!

I don't see the harm, but I also don't think girls are so flighty that they make career decisions based on t-shirt slogans.

Lots of my female relatives have become doctors, nurses, and pharmaceutical researchers, but none have become physicists, chemists, engineers, computer programmers, or mathematicians, as several of the males have. My daughter wants to be a doctor, like her mom, and I would not be surprised if she did. If women's inclinations and aptitudes lead them to health care rather than STEM (although biology is a science), what is the problem? The choices are not writing C code or working at McDonald's.

You're missing the point. Girls are subjected to a constant bombardment of media stereotypes that say, among other things, they should not science. This makes counter-messaging, in a multitude of forms, necessary.

I mean... "flighty." Boys are rarely described as flighty, so there's a negatively-charged gender stereotype right there.

Rather, girls age 4-9 are quite impressionable (just like boys are), and something as simple as a t-shirt message can be quite profound to that audience... good or bad. By the time they've advanced from that age, a sense of identity is emerging, and gender (and any social expectations around that) is an important part of it.


By women's "inclinations" you mean "socially-prescribed gender role." Which is, again, the entire point.