Our society just can’t seem to get it.

For hundreds of years, we primarily educated boys. Then a bunch of women burned err tossed their bras into a trashcan, and we shifted gears. Can’t we try to educate our children equally?

Charlotte Allen at Minding the Campus has an excellent post on the problem of feminizing our education system.

This is an issue that particularly interests me. For a while, I was the director of development and communications for a girl-focused nonprofit. I wrote grant after grant on educational issues, particularly in the area of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Despite the fact that girls’ and boys’ scores are now equal, albeit tremendously lower than other industrialized nations, there is still a crisis going on with girls. Why?

Already only 28 percent of entering college freshman choose STEM majors, and only 17 percent of undergraduate degrees are awarded in STEM fields. Because male high school students consistently outperform their female counterparts on the quantitative section of the SAT exam that tests mathematical reasoning, the foundation of the sciences (probably because—sorry, Harvard faculty!–the male brain is structured that way), STEM majors are overwhelmingly male-dominated. Only 14 percent of female entering freshmen decide to major in STEM fields, compared with 33 percent of male freshmen.

Because only 14% of women (the statistics I always found were 20%) choose STEM fields, it’s a travesty. I still remember how this was explained to me:

While girls and boys are scoring equally on standardized tests in math and science, girls only make up a minority of STEM careers. This is a problem because these jobs pay more and are in higher demand. Since poverty is now a female problem, by encouraging more girls to enter these fields, we could curb poverty.

What happened to choice? In the U.S, most freshmen are legal adults. These young adults are fully briefed on the varying levels of income that his/her degree will likely earn over a lifetime. If she decides to pursue other fields (say women’s studies), isn’t that her right to choose?