Hidden Figures Podcast Reflection

First off: We made a podcast! Recording it was much easier and fun than I expected, and I didn't hate the sound of my own voice. Which was a strange experience, because I used to abhor recordings of myself. Editing it was much harder. Conversations that I thought were really coherent weren't. I wound up putting in little bloops for when the conversation switched significantly (and I cut out a bunch of stuff in between), but I'm not sure that was the right decision. It was really fun to edit but took a lot more time than I expected. Overall, it was a great experience.

Moving on to the meet of the response:

The main obstacles women and minorities face are established groups that are prejudiced against hiring and advancing them. Also, the general society they grow up in may implicitly or explicitly try to teach them that STEM is a men's world, so they are discouraged from being interested. 

One reason this might be so challenging to break is that engineers hire other engineers that look and think like them with rigorous technical interviews that accidentally maximize People Like Us bias. (I've covered this extensively in a previous blog post).

I don't think famous role models are important. I don't think I ever had one. The Mythbusters would be about the closest I ever had to a popular role model. However, my dad was much more important. He works in Computer Science, and he would discuss work at the dinner table once in a while. I never really understood what was going on (I distinctly remember a conversation where I had no idea why a computer would need a "clock cycle"), but he was interested in his work and seemed to like it. Even if I couldn't understand the problems, they sounded intriguing, and so did his process for solving them.
So I don't think popular role models have as much of an effect as people seem to think - at least, not to me. I think what's more important is someone close to you to encourage you to try out the field. Also, now that I think of it, when I was trying to decide between joining Science or Engineering, both my parents pushed towards engineering, since that's what they did. So they must have had a significant impact on everything else in my life that helped guide me to choose STEM.