I'm sick of being called a geek.

I mean, what's so geeky about us anyways?

Gentlemen, good news.

Do Dungeons and Dragons handbook? Deities and demigods.

We're going to have fun Friday night.

I'm Greta Johnson. I'm Trisha Bobita. And this is the Nerdap Podcast. This week, we're nerding out hard about role-playing games. We are nearly 40 episodes into NerdUp podcast, and this is our first time talking about role-playing games. So we realize the time is nigh. Yes. I had a blast with the creators of OneShot, a podcast all about role-playing games, and we'll hear a little bit from my session with them and an interview with the creators of One Shot, who are also game strategists. I kind of like to think of your time playing this role-playing game as like a job shadow, but like true nerd job. True nerd job for sure. I was the elf wizard bangerang, so we'll hear more about that

later on in the show. In the meantime, we're going to talk with Olga Hazan. She writes for the

Atlantic. Whenever Greta and I are scouring the internet for things that are about lady nerds,

we often find her byline attached to very smart stuff. Like an article she wrote recently for the Atlantic about how women are faring in STEM fields all around the world. We're Russian. My mom called me on International Women's Day to congratulate me on being a woman. And I was like, thanks, Mom. But like, we don't really do that in the U.S. So it is a little bit weird, but it tends to be a big deal in other places.

And then the OECD and World Bank and stuff release a lot of data on International Women's Day.

So it's a good day for nerding out about women. Yeah, that's what we do here at NERDette every week. Exactly. I love just seeing the starkness of some of these charts in terms of girls saying that they feel helpless performing a math problem way more often than boys, but they're actually what? Not that much worse at doing math when you look at test scores. Yeah. So in almost every country, girls are more likely to say that they feel helpless when they're doing math. But then when they actually take the test, they only score about 2% less on average. In almost every country, boys and girls are pretty much even. One of the other things that really stuck out to me was the fact that Mexico has the highest ratio of women-awarded computer science degrees. And that's something that we've talked a lot about on our show is the fact that it's still less than 15% of undergrads in the U.S. computer science majors are female. What of that

data set surprised you most? The computer science thing was really fascinating because actually some of the

countries that we always think about as women's paradises, like the Netherlands and Belgium and Switzerland,

had the lowest number of women majoring in computer science, even lower than the U.S. They were down below 10.

And the countries where women are most likely to major in computer science are places like

Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, Israel, I don't really know the reason for that. It could be that

because, for example, Mexico's economy started to speed up much later than Western Europe or the U.S.

And it could be that by the time computer science jobs really became available in Mexico,

that society had already progressed to the point where there wasn't the stigma of it being a male

profession attached to it. Like, by the time people were majoring in computer science, it was just like English or history. It was something that everyone did and there wasn't this feeling of, oh, if I do this, I'll be less feminine. And also, you know, a really good way to make a lot of money if you live in Mexico is to major in computer science and get a really high-paying job and take advantage of the low cost of living. There's so much data that you looked at in this

story. There were very few instances where you could be like, in every country, this is a thing that

happened. But one that was really remarkable was that women spend less time on paid work than men do.

...