It's okay to tell your daughter she's pretty

There has been a great deal of hard research into why men and women end up focusing on different subject and career areas. For example, research shows that women who tend to have a high aptitude for math and science are also high-aptitude in other areas, while men with high aptitudes in math and science have fewer other academic strengths. This means that promising female engineers have other options, so many act on other preferences and considerations, while potential male engineers have fewer alternatives. Women also express greater preferences for careers that put them in direct touch with people and aren’t as satisfied with what can be the more isolated environment of the lab. You can read more about such factors and research in this paper, or in this book edited by the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers.

Of course, we want our daughters to know that all options are open to them and to have female role models in areas like math and science. We want our society to send messages so that girls recognize their true value isn’t their appearance. Our society should mentor girls and young women to try to encourage a continuing love of science and math.

Yet we shouldn’t assume success requires that women and men to be equally interested in all subject matters, and to think that differences in outcomes are driven by sexism. Particularly when government gets involved, the focus can become making the numbers add up, which means that part of the solution can become discouraging boys, rather than encouraging girls, and cajoling girls into arenas that may not ultimately be their best fit.