Girls, you don’t have to go into STEM. Look at me.

Louie Cronin is a novelist, essayist and audio engineer for PRI's The World. Previously, she worked as an associate producer for Car Talk on NPR.

Recently on PRI's The World, as part of our Across Women’s Lives series, we aired several interviews that encouraged young women who liked math to go into engineering, one of the so-called STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.)

I followed that advice. And here's mine: “No! Don’t fall for it. Run the other way, as fast as you can!” 

I made that mistake. You see, loving math and loving engineering are two completely different things. 

The summer before I headed back to college to finish my degree, I discovered college radio and fell in love. This was what I wanted to do with my life. I would study mass communications and work in radio. But a friend who had graduated in mass communications, and was working fulltime as a waitress at a steakhouse, warned me off.

“You’ll never get a radio job with a degree in communications. Look at me! But if you’re good at math, all the broadcast networks are looking for women engineers. You can break in that way.” 

I was good at math. I was on the math team in high school, even won an honorable mention in a math journal. I tutored math when I lived in New York, everything from arithmetic to calculus. And I admit, I love sitting down with a pad of paper and a freshly sharpened pencil, and working on a math problem. It feels so clean, so pure, so orderly. It feeds my soul. 

Not so with engineering.

I enrolled in Electrical Engineering classes instead of my intended communications. My first EE professor told this joke to welcome us to the profession: An engineer, a mathematician and a physicist are standing in three corners of a room, in the middle of which is a naked woman. The men are told, you can approach this woman, and when you get there, do whatever you want with her, but each step you take has to be half of the one before.

The mathematician laughs. “Ha! That’s an old one,” he says. “If you approach a point in space by halves, you’ll never get there.” The physicist nods. “That’s Zeno’s Paradox. You think we don’t know about infinity?” The engineer says, “That’s OK, I’ll get close enough for my purposes!”  

All the elegance, beauty and purity of my beloved mathematics flew right out the window. I should have changed majors that day. I would have been happier in math, physics or communications. But it’s hard to do that when you’re a kid. And that’s what students are, kids. So I worry about all this pressure on girls to go into the STEM fields. Girls should find out what they love and go into that. If it’s engineering, fine. Let’s break down the walls, remove all gender barriers, give them the math skills they need. But please, don’t push them.

I do think it’s a shame that girls get turned off by math. I tutored a lot of women to take the GMATs, GRE’s, SATs, etc. And I found that my average female student had checked out of math around fractions! What year is that? Third grade? And forget about decimals and percentages. I could see their eyes glaze over at the mention of them.

One of the interviews we did as part of the AWL series was with Anna Rothschild, an inspiring young colleague here at WGBH who does a web series for PBS called Gross Science. She told us she loved science as a girl, the slimier the better, dissected frog guts, tongue-eating parasites, regurgitated owl pellets. You get the idea. Her love of science was infectious and she encouraged other young women to follow her into the STEM fields. I was almost taken in myself.

But girls, listen closely. That happy young woman waxing eloquent about undigested mouse bones? She works in TV.