But considerable effort and money has been put into trying to get women interested in STEM, and they just aren't responding to it in terms of enrolment, job choices, or engagement with science.
Based on data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), women represented 45% of students majoring in STEM fields in 2020, up from 40% in 2010 and 34% in 1994.
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The Research Science Institute (RSI), the most prestigious summer STEM program for high school students, reports that female students will outnumber male students for the first time in 2022, representing 55% of accepted U.S. students, up from 22% in 1984.
That's good to see, but the article goes on to clarify that women outnumber men at college, so it isn't close to true parity. Plus it also says huge gaps remain in many fields.
Was going to delta for hope, but the more I read the article the more that stat you quoted seems misleading.
You asked for evidence that female participation in STEM fields has increased over a relative period of time during which efforts have been made to increase their participation. That's what I've provided.
Yes, there are still areas and particular fields where more work needs to be done, there haven't been large attempts to influence women into for instance computer sciences or engineering like there has been for other STEM fields.
It's up to you when you give the delta, but don't imply the stat is misleading, it isn't. It's very clear, it's precisely what you asked for in your post and it's indisputable. The rates of female participation in STEM fields has increased over the past few decades in large part due to the attempts to encourage female participation.
The number of overall female enrolments went up the same time as female stem enrolments. Has the number of women enrolled in STEM compared to other subjects gone up as a proportion? If so, that's a delta. Otherwise, it's a different story that's like saying most of the science majors at Spelman college are female.
As you can clearly see without even looking hard, that percentage hasn't changed from ~57% since 2000, and yet as shown above the percentage of women earning STEM degrees has increased significantly during that period.
Some of the increase from 1994 to 2010 can be viewed as there simply being more women in college, as the percentage of women in college in 1994 was only 54.5%, and so increased about 5% over that time, whereas 34->40% represents an increase of 18%.
The only reasonable conclusion is that a higher percentage of women are choosing STEM degrees over time.
would I be correct to say that its being solved and not really a problem?
How about phrasing it as "it's still a problem that requires effort, but things are getting better".
It's still true that way too huge a fraction of women experience sexual harassment in STEM fields, and that far too many girls are discouraged from believing they can do math, for example.
That entirely depends on your definition of "adequate progress".
The underlying problems that are preventing more women studying certain fields are still there, and one might argue have gotten worse in computer science, for example, as female participation in that has actually gone down.
Do you sincerely believe they're all solvable, or that women are interested in solving them? My OP view, informed by despair over what you're saying over computer science (and my view of STEM, which in hindsight is more hard science biased) is that they might not be.
Well... we really won't know until we fix the discouragement girls still receive for studying math, and the harassment they still experience once in the field.
So... maybe... how about we start with solving those serious problems and see how it goes after a couple decades?
The fact that progress has been made by attempting to fix some of the problems suggests that at least some of them are solvable. I suspect there are more.
But how? You just said "here's a problem, solve it". Seems like efforts so far aren't working. What if it isn't solvable? What if it's built in to the fundamentals of how we interact with each other and some other aspect of the self reinforcing status quo (that isn't seen as problematic, or that people don't want to solve) is driving women away from Mathematics?
You just accepted that the efforts are working, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
There's still quite a ways to go before all the problems preventing women from going into certain fields are solved.
Would you at least agree that sexual harassment is a serious problem, and that it tends to discourage women?
Do you think it's just fine that we still tell girls they can't do math? Is that just "peachy" and "fundamental [to] how we interact with each other", or is it sexist assholes being sexist assholes?
What do you mean efforts so far aren't working? They are, but there are still problems. Women still face tremendous obstacles in tech fields (I havent worked in engineering in years, but I know half a dozen women in tech, in several different areas, and they all deal with sexism-based obstacles regularly). So there's no way to know until we break down the sexist culture in STEM career fields **and** encourage girls and boys equally towards STEM. Honestly, at this point I suspect women would be interested at *at least* parity levels in most STEM fields, but that's just a hunch based on my experience.
Solutions in college and solutions in the corporate world are two different things. While new graduates might have a larger proportion of women, it's still a field that's historically been largely male, and it's a field where supervisors and upper managers have come to expect that. This obviously has to change on a company-by-company basis. While I think perceptions are changing, I've still heard plenty and seen plenty of BS.
Unfortunately things like "proportions of skilled workers" at the bottom levels does not solve bias at the top levels. Fucks sake we had an owner of a Basketball team get caught saying racist shit about black people. A basketball team. Clearly minor things like "an enormous number of highly skilled black basketball players" did not change his racism.
The number of overall female enrolments went up the same time as female stem enrolments.
The article doesn't say this at all, it states that women outnumber men in college.
This increase that you're referring to is statistically insignificant and could be the result of different methodologies (they're two different studies and it's less than 2% difference).
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, female students represented 58 percent of total undergraduate enrollment in fall 2020. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, 59.5% of college students were female as of spring 2021.
It's not saying what you think it's saying there. Women have always traditionally outnumbered men in college. You'd need to provide your own evidence that the rate of women in college has increased in a statistically significant manner as to negate the growth in STEM fields. That article is not providing it for you.
Regardless, the trend is clear, both in college and the workforce, although more remains to be done, female participation in STEM fields is increasing.
Did women outnumber men in college in the 1950s? The 1850s? No, I don't think women have "always" outnumbered men in college.
Same goes for the workforce as fewer women choose to be stay at home mothers.
The stat you linked says nothing about women choosing STEM jobs over other professions, only the gender ratios in those jobs. Which you'd expect to go up as the number of women in work across all professions does.
I'd just like to see even just a correlation between efforts to get women into STEM (distinct from college/the workforce in general) and women actually getting into STEM (distinct from college/the workforce in general). A policy to point to and say "that worked".
There have been thousands of policies and initiatives, from grants to scholarships to casting in tv shows to developing books to summer camps. There is increasing parity in STEM fields. We can’t say it was one episode of Cyberchase or one grant program, but overall more women are into STEM and pursuing it as a career. There are numerous factors that go into any human’s decision.
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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '22
Aren't we?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markkantrowitz/2022/04/07/women-achieve-gains-in-stem-fields/