If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
Interpretation
Cultural perceptions influence the participation of girls in STEM fields.
This quote by Jocelyn Bell Burnell highlights the impact of cultural norms and stereotypes on the participation of women in science and engineering disciplines. It suggests that in many English-speaking countries, societal expectations dictate what is deemed appropriate for girls, leading to gender disparities in these fields, unlike in other cultures where such barriers may be less pronounced.
In practice
During a panel on gender equality in education, this quote could emphasize the need for cultural change.
There's some evidence that if you're recruiting, you tend to recruit a mini-me. Then you have a very comfortable group round a table. You all think alike. You agree. People are arguing that the banking crisis was because too many of the relevant bodies were thinkalikes, and that if they'd had more diversity, maybe it wouldn't have happened.
The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.
A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.
Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.
When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.
My generation was the turning point. Women older than us didn't expect to have jobs or careers; those younger did. But we were where it was changing - which is interesting but uncomfortable.
I was enjoying myself writing, because I don't know what's going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don't know at all what you're going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you're a kid and you're reading stories.
Teenagers are in some ways the best readers because their imaginations haven't been narrowed down by boring things like jobs and the realities of money and capitalism.
We live in a society that penalizes highly creative individuals for their non-conformist autonomy. This makes the teaching of problem solving in design both discouraging and difficult. A...student (has) massive blocks against new ways of thinking, engendered by some 16 years of mis-education.
I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are trying to do is wrong, that education is our basic right.
The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.
A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.
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