>>> Girls are already interested. It’s more about making students aware of the different careers in science and getting parents and teachers on board.”
This rings so true - even in my career, good mentorship (at the right time) would have very different outcomes.
I think of all the productivity statistics we worry about, and yes when productivity was lifting heavier piles of earth, capital investment mattered.
Today's productivity comes from better organisation and better capabilities- either do more with less or invent new things to do.
And those are deep educational and social issues.
As an example I suspect YC itself is good proof that there is not a fixed pool of entrepreneurs but that by improving the fertility of the VC soil more people fall over that weird line of risk-taking.
Imagine there was a pill that would turn regular folks into people willing to stop at nothing to make their idea a success. Now with a million fired up entrepreneurs do we have enough early stage funds? Enough lawyers with startup experience, enough HR Saas accounts?
If inspired entrepreneurs were not a limiting factor (which seems to be what VCs say when they look for a great founder) what else is broken about our eco-system?
And if we could fix that, what else is broken about the eco-system for getting young girls (and boys) into scientific productive careers?
To me science as a field is somehow more primitive and backward in that it's still first and foremost about building one's CV, like an explorer putting their name on places before the other guy gets there. This doesn't generally match the current environment where everyone is pursuing the same incremental advances and will get there sooner or later. Yet we pretend the one person who's paper got past reviewers first deserves all the credit for that increment plus the increments that follow. The first implementations often don't even work.
Presumably the reason it works this way is because the funding process in research rewards this approach. Elsewhere like in engineering, results are what matter. Science will probably evolve in this direction as we need more and more of it, and results are produced in more shared-credit environments like big labs instead of academia. Then it won't be so much about the Matthew effect which favors those who got started the earliest (which tends to be boys).
This rings so true - even in my career, good mentorship (at the right time) would have very different outcomes.
I think of all the productivity statistics we worry about, and yes when productivity was lifting heavier piles of earth, capital investment mattered.
Today's productivity comes from better organisation and better capabilities- either do more with less or invent new things to do.
And those are deep educational and social issues.
As an example I suspect YC itself is good proof that there is not a fixed pool of entrepreneurs but that by improving the fertility of the VC soil more people fall over that weird line of risk-taking.
Imagine there was a pill that would turn regular folks into people willing to stop at nothing to make their idea a success. Now with a million fired up entrepreneurs do we have enough early stage funds? Enough lawyers with startup experience, enough HR Saas accounts?
If inspired entrepreneurs were not a limiting factor (which seems to be what VCs say when they look for a great founder) what else is broken about our eco-system?
And if we could fix that, what else is broken about the eco-system for getting young girls (and boys) into scientific productive careers?