[EDEQUITY Girls Dialogue] Girls in science, technology, politics

From: Linda Purrington (lpurring@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Apr 24 2001 - 09:55:09 EDT


I have been listening to the report that girls are not interested in
science, technology, and politics for as long as I can remember,
wondering if I should be more interested in these pursuits, or if girls
and women should be, or if they/we should feel lacking if we are not,
etc. But the report is still that they are not interested--and I think
I may begin to see why. We tend to think of education as a good in
itself; but it is more real than that--education has consequences, has
connections to life after formal education. We can give our girls the
best education in the world, and it will have meaning in precise
proportion to how fully they can make use of that education after the
school years. Without the Equal Rights Amendment, we will not earn more
than 75 cents on the male dollar anyway; and the need for the ERA in the
first place tells us that we do not have equal rights; we are sending
girls out telling them they can be president when in fact, take a
look--you ever seen one? Without the Equal Rights Amendment, we cannot
hang on to the gains we have made with Title IX; we need educational
rights that are grounded in constitutional equal rights, not in just a
federal funding law. We need to make sure that girls see themselves in
the future as having both the power and the responsibility for leading
the nation, leading the army, leading the economy, leading science and
technology. Otherwise, why should they learn this stuff? It is knowing
that one may be drafted that makes rocketry germane to boys; it is
knowing that one may raise a child that makes child care germane to
girls; so we need to join the army and the Senate and we need to insist
that men do child care as a matter of course, not out of charity. When
that happens, we will have an educational system that corresponds to our
aspirations.
Linda Purrington
Title IX Advocates
lpurring@earthlink.net



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