Why don't more girls sign up for the automotive technology class?

Is that a difficult question? Females were once completely excluded from some things that very few of us wanted to do. That's the way it was when I went to junior high school and the girls were required to study sewing and cooking in the same class period where the boys were forced to do mechanical drawing and shop. Obviously, a few boys would have thrived in sewing and/or cooking (and there are serious careers, full of men, at the end of that line of education). And some girls could have benefited from access to the mechanical drawing/shop track.

It's good that Title IX changed that. But the now-clear wrongness of the total exclusion does not mean that a male/female imbalance is a problem. And yet that's how NPR portrays it in this piece titled "The Shop Class Stigma: What Title IX Didn't Change." See? The assumption is that if male/female balance doesn't ensue, it's because entering a male-dominated field makes females feel stigmatized.

"I think in some of the fields, just the nature of the work that kids see going on in those fields, isn't going to attract that many women. Automotive technology isn't a field that you see women in," [said says Tom Evans, the principal at Eastern Technical High, a magnet school in Essex, Md.]...

"We make a serious attempt at getting girls into engineering. We recruit girls from all over the county, and that's paid off a little bit," he says, "but engineering by itself is a field where I think women are starting to see female engineers."

Zoe says that's why her family tried and failed to get her to switch from automotive technology to the engineering program. "But I think it would be cool if I owned my own shop, like a car shop," Zoe says...

"I can see her owning her own shop as a business woman, but I can't see her out working on a car," says Elayne Digman, Zoe's grandmother. Digman is one of those family members who just can't picture Zoe taking car engines apart and getting all greasy....

Now, for the most part, schools don't discriminate or deny girls educational opportunities. Yet, the conclusion by a National Women's Law Center study a few years ago raised a different point.

Boys are still routinely steered toward courses that lead to higher-paying careers in technology and trades. Meanwhile, 90 percent of students in courses that lead to lower-wage jobs, like child care and cosmetology, are female...

But wait a minute! Isn't that what Zoe's family is doing? Steering her into engineering rather than working on cars? Working on cars isn't seen as a good enough job, so if you've got an ambitious and talented girl, you may prod her into a more lucrative field. A boy who only wanted to work on cars might be left alone, just as a girl might be allowed to indulge her love for makeup and hair-styling.

If you really want to know whether females are getting a worse deal than males and you insist on using Zoe as your example of a female, then you must compare her to a male who is challenging the norm in an equivalent way. Take a teenage boy who signs up for the child care classes and tells everyone that's what he loves and where he wants to spend his career. What would his grandfather say about that? Probably the equivalent of Zoe's grandma not being able to picture her taking car engines apart and getting all greasy. I just can't picture Joey changing diapers and getting all poopy.

And if so, there's your gender equity.