When I was a young teen, I had the fleeting fantasy that I would someday found a magazine called Geek Chic. It would be a glossy in the vein of Seventeen or the now-defunct YM, except that its mission would be to show the world that gosh darn it, geeks are cool, too.
So what if the dictionary definition of “geek” describes someone who is either a.) a carnival performer who bites the heads off of live chickens or, more commonly, b.) a person who is intelligent but also awkward? My take was that geeks — of either variety, though I didn’t actually know any chicken head biters — were as deserving of friendship and respect as smooth-talking class president types or confident jocks who could bench press half the math team. This probably gives you some idea of my social standing back in the day, but let’s not dwell on that.
Fast forward to the present: While I never did found that magazine, I’ve loved watching the word “geek” find a happy home in pop culture. From the wiz kids of Silicon Valley, to the brilliant and socially inept protagonists portrayed on hit TV shows, to the fanboy and fangirl throngs at Comic-Con, geek is now a label many seem to wear proudly. Being a geek, I’ve assumed, is trendy …
Except, if that’s the case, that trend apparently has not found its way into today’s high schools. In a piece in The Washington Post‘s PostEverything online magazine, Tricia Berry, the director of the Women in Engineering Program at the University of Texas at Austin, argues that “‘geek’ still carries a negative connotation that many girls and women do not associate with.”
What’s worse, she says, is that conflating the term “geek” with the pursuit of careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) may actually be discouraging young women from joining these lucrative fields that, right now, continue to be heavily dominated by men. She writes:
Using a socially awkward loner as a symbol for STEM isn’t an effective method for attracting girls to these fields…[W]e risk isolating many by suggesting that these careers are only for people who embrace their inner geek. We should be showing young women that they can love science and math while also being fun and social people with broad interests.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I’m in favor of just about anything that brings at least some semblance of gender parity to the STEM fields. Young women who are “fun and social” as Tricia Berry describes definitely shouldn’t avoid STEM because they worry that it’s solely the domain of “socially awkward loners.”
On the other hand, I am disappointed in the news that no, the word “geek” — nor the group of people it describes — hasn’t come as far as I thought apparently. In high school, at least, it seems that the smart kids who don’t always say or wear the right thing may still be the objects of ridicule rather than the subjects of flattering comparisons to Mark Zuckerberg.
Sigh. For the greater good, I guess I’ll support jettisoning the term “geek.” But I’ll always have a special place in my heart for smart, socially awkward loners, whether they’re in high school or on TV or out in the real world. If you’re doing well and doing good, keep doing it, no matter how awkward people say you are …
Unless that thing that makes you awkward is that you like to bite the heads off of live chickens. Maybe stop doing that.
Image courtesy of ThinkStock
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