Ask HN: Why do we push people into STEM?
Google Doodle is obsessed with depicting woman in lab coats such as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;doodles&#x2F;michiyo-tsujimuras-133rd-birthday" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;doodles&#x2F;michiyo-tsujimuras-133rd-birt...</a>.<p>I criticized the Tokyo Olympics Doodle as being ridden with cliches of Otaku&#x2F;Nerd culture tropes of videos games and anime. I worked at Google and all too familiar with the financial incentives and tainted behavior around the promotion process to declare projects &quot;launch&quot; and &quot;land&quot; despite public reception and user benefit. At the time, most Japanese people were opposed to the continuation of the Olympics. This is a society that avoids confrontation and dissonant. The olympics were not cause for celebration. It was something politicians wanted to proceed with, and people had to accept. Who was the intended audience for this Doodle? Westerners? It seemed like it was someone associated with the Google Doodle team who shilled and self-promoted the Doodle here on HN. I made this criticism and was downvoted without a substantive response. Point being, this is an example of Doodle being culturally oblivious.<p>A few weeks later, Google Doodle followed up with another Japanese related doodle. Like HA!, we&#x27;ll show that uncultured guy how much we know about Japan. The Doodle featured Michiyo Tsujimura. Of course she is depicted in a lab coat. She was a scientist who discovered the health benefits of green tea. If you search her on YouTube, the results have less than a thousand views and all generated after the release the Doodle, seemingly by bots or other low quality content produce. I think she an obscure figure, and I&#x27;m curious if Japanese people care.<p>As part of my art history minor during university, I took a 5 credit class on Chado, Japanese tea ceremony. My professor was a caucasian guy who went to Japan and got a Masters Degree in tea ceremony. I guess it&#x27;s a thing. This is very impressive for any non-Japanese person because a high-level of language proficiency is needed, but moreover Chado is a practice of the elite. Japan ranks 2nd lowest on the 35+ countries that took the TOEFL, people don&#x27;t speak English here. Back to tea. Japan is historically a classist and hierarchical society. Only the nobility engaged in tea ceremony. Despite its rustic and subtle appearance, the Japanese tea rooms and straw tea huts are incredibly expensive. Per square footage, they would cost the same as a luxury apartment in NYC if not more. Imperfectly looking Japanese chawan tea bowls with the &quot;Wabi Sabi&quot; aesthetic can easily fetch $10,000. Same with other tea instruments. There is the Raku style of bowls <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Raku_ware" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Raku_ware</a>, which technically can only be considered a true Raku bowl if it is made by a particular lineage of the Raku family in Kyoto. A sub class of Wabi Sabi is Kintsugi which is mending broken tea pottery sometimes with gold. For the purposes of simply drinking a beverage, this is all impractical. Tea ceremony is a symbol of the elite, in the same way Minimalism in the West is a privilege of the affluent. Warlords settled diplomatic matters in tea rooms. Museums and such in Japan put these cultural elements on display for the public, but historically a farmer would never see the inside of a tea room. Japan still retains elitist traits of its history, and tea is no different. The tea organizations and society are still relatively closed to the public, so for them to accept a foreigner into their ranks is mind blowing to me. The tea research estate in Kyoto literally has guys in suits and sunglasses as bodyguards.<p>I also spent a year backpacking Kyoto 996 where I went to every pilgrimage and historical site related to tea. All of this to say, I know about green tea and its culture. I don&#x27;t think Japanese people give a damn about the health benefits of green tea. If they did, it&#x27;s probably after the fact rationalization.<p>Japanese people drink green tea because its culture. If Japanese people cared about the health benefits of beverages, there wouldn&#x27;t be such high consumption of alcohol and sake. Japan never really went into lockdown during the pandemic, but kept daily cases in the low hundreds, despite low vaccinations. By March 2021, Japan had less than 1% vaccination rate. There was a very clever policy: establishments aren&#x27;t allowed to serve alcohol 8PM. With the surge in omicron, this policy has been re-instated for like the 5th time. This policy is enough to deter people from traveling and dining out by a visible magnitude.<p>Again, who are these Doodles for? Who cares about the health benefits of green tea?<p>Whole Foods and tea exporters probably care most about the health benefits of green tea. Zen buddhism, green tea and other such homeopathic remedies are the new wave conceptions Westerners have of the East. As an American, I used to this think Buddhism is this individualistic practice of self-discovery. One of the most popular schools of buddhism in Japan believes in heaven and is closer to monotheistic faiths like Christianity than to the Zen buddhism that Westerners think of. Then again, Japanese monks can get married and drink alcohol, so it&#x27;s another uniquely Japanese thing.<p>Despite its attempts to be cosmopolitan, Google Doodle succumbs to Western Perceptions and Biases. There is the ideological views embedded in the obsession with woman in lab coats such as Michiyo Tsujimura. I have a dozen friends who majored in Feminist studies, ironically at &quot;Woman&#x27;s College&quot; commonplace in Asia. They&#x27;ve explained that urging woman to careers in male-dominated fields is entry level feminism. Even though woman are overrepresented in creative fields, if they like it then they should be empowered to do so. If they want to be a house-maker, they should be empowered to do so. Woman should be empowered to do whatever they want. Does it seem right then to portray scientists&#x2F;STEM as somehow more noble? If we wanted a female Japanese figure for a Doodle, why not someone like Rei Kawakubo? She&#x27;s arguably the most cultural influential Japanese fashion design. And Japanese people care about their fashion. Her businesses are huge commercial successes, too, her label Commes Des Garcons raked in $280 million in sales in 2017.<p>Here are other examples of Google Doodle. They feature Westerners summiting Mt Everest, while the sherpas who buried the figure out of an avalanche, nurtured them back to health for the next 2 days, carried them to the top, was left invisible from the Doodle. When they featured Wanda Rutkiewicz, it was for her successful summit of Everest, rather than her accomplishment at K2. Everest is commercialized, you can&#x27;t pay sherpas to risk K2. Even when Doodle highlights people, they miss the opportunities.<p>Seeing the biases and shallow wokeness of the Google Doodle team, I would resign immediately if I had to work with them ( I already quit Google ). I had dinner with the Google Arts &amp; Culture team once. They were so likable and actually cultured. Strangely, the ones I met were temp contractors. These people deserve full time jobs. I just found that Google Arts and Culture already featured Rei Kawakubo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;artsandculture.google.com&#x2F;entity&#x2F;rei-kawakubo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;artsandculture.google.com&#x2F;entity&#x2F;rei-kawakubo</a>. This is unsurprising, and reiterates my point that Google Arts &amp; Culture is actually cultured. We can empower woman and enrich&#x2F;educate the world about different cultures, without the narrow ideological views of the Doodle team. I would buy some Google stock if Google replaces the Doodle team with the Google Arts &amp; Culture, but then again maybe the Doodle team is doing exactly what Google needs it to