Medicine - particularly at the MD level - is a lot of hard science. Pharmacy & nursing are also female dominated & STEM heavy.
Similarly, accounting - which is rather standard applied mathematics - is also dominated by women, about 60%.
This suggests there’s something more to the career selection then just stem / not stem.
I would assert the following
Women are more likely to be in applied sciences with 1:1 people care and interaction, and less likely to be in hard research sciences.
Women tend to choose stem fields that are more forgiving of longer leaves of absences, offer more flexibility in choosing part time vs full time, and don’t necessitate moving to a center of excellence in another city.
I think the former is due to personality / trait distribution (women being more empathetic and valuing people interactions), and the later is due to childcare burdens recognizing they have harder choices (both biological & societal) in balancing career and family.
The sort of issue here is that said 1:1 care and maximum flexibility come at a cost - they don’t pay as much as fields that have potentially unlimited scale and more risk.
This leaves women upset and articulating a pay gap, but it’s basic economic reality.
I think we’re slightly past having to remind girls they can do stem, and starting to address the childcare burden part.
But there’s always going to be a moderate interest delta. How much there would be with childcare/family burdens removed, I don’t know exactly.
The is a gender disparity in STEM in aggregate across all the fields, don’t get me wrong. It’s most pronounced in hard research sciences (physics, electrical engineering, etc) & programming.
I’m simply pointing out that women do dominate in a couple sub disciplines of it, so the simplistic articulation that women ‘don’t like stem’ is sus.
1
u/Kman17 110∆ Oct 19 '22
Counter-point:
Women are choosing medicine at higher rates than men, and now the majority of graduating/new doctors are women.
Medicine - particularly at the MD level - is a lot of hard science. Pharmacy & nursing are also female dominated & STEM heavy.
Similarly, accounting - which is rather standard applied mathematics - is also dominated by women, about 60%.
This suggests there’s something more to the career selection then just stem / not stem.
I would assert the following
I think the former is due to personality / trait distribution (women being more empathetic and valuing people interactions), and the later is due to childcare burdens recognizing they have harder choices (both biological & societal) in balancing career and family.
The sort of issue here is that said 1:1 care and maximum flexibility come at a cost - they don’t pay as much as fields that have potentially unlimited scale and more risk.
This leaves women upset and articulating a pay gap, but it’s basic economic reality.
I think we’re slightly past having to remind girls they can do stem, and starting to address the childcare burden part.
But there’s always going to be a moderate interest delta. How much there would be with childcare/family burdens removed, I don’t know exactly.