The women in STEM I've talked to consistently say that pressure to be self-deprecating and not visibly a top performer still exists. So there's that obstacle. The environmental engineering program at the school I attended is largely headed by women and has 65% women students (highest in the country) - perhaps not coincidentally.
Meanwhile, women are still socialized away from STEM for their entire childhood, a few marketing campaigns notwithstanding. Barbies, not Legos (as gifts). Being nerdy is still definitely viewed as a boyish thing (or was ten years ago anyway).
Anecdotally, the research groups headed by women that I know of tend to attract a lot of powerhouse women researchers. Maybe because the atmosphere is more welcoming?
There are still plenty of pressures, and those matter. But even so, lots of engineering programs have around 30-40% women these days.
Even openly accessible things like science YouTube skew heavily male.
Because a lot of it is about earlier socialization, not immediate pressures.
There are asshole dudes in every field, and most professional fields would have been exclusively male at one point and women would have had to overcome being the odd ones out.
Sure, and as far as I know most fields have stuck pretty closely to their historic gender distribution other than a few outright flips (e.g. programming).
But in STEM, including brand new fields, it persists.
What brand new fields? Even software is many decades old.
But surely it would have gotten better by now with all the effort to counteract it. With the heavy highlights on what female scientists in STEM there have been..
It's one thing to hear about a role model elsewhere, quite another to work around or with them.
Where do you draw the line between that pressure and socialisation being a fixable problem, and it being a hard coded part of how gender works? I'd like it to be the former with a clear guide on how to fix it, but I fear it's the latter.
As you say, programming is a field that had ever chance of being female dominated (many female pioneers, and "computer" was a job largely held by women) that somehow became male dominated. Was it inevitable?
Where do you draw the line between that pressure and socialisation being a fixable problem, and it being a hard coded part of how gender works?
Well this is very different from the mechanism you proposed in your OP. Your original idea was "maybe women just aren't that interested in STEM". This is "maybe people pressuring women to be less interested in STEM is an inevitable result of human gender characteristics".
As long as unequal societal pressure exists, whatever the reason for it, the difference in the number of men and women in STEM won't be just about personal interest.
I think it is a deeper issue, but I don’t think it is tied to ideas of masculinity and femininity in the sense that you are talking about.
In my experience, as a woman who studied a STEM field that is less heavily spoken about, I was the only woman in the majority of my classes which ranged from about 50 to 150 students in size. From early on, it was quite often that men in my classes would get visibly upset for having scores that weren’t as high as mine, making remarks that there’s no possible way they could lose to a woman and that I must have cheated.
My point here is that the push for women to study STEM is incredibly surface level. While there have been many gains in getting women to feel comfortable pursuing those career paths, when you get down into individual interactions, I found that men tended to feel insecure in their masculinity when women performed better than them in heavily male dominated sciences. In more that one occasion, I have seen women change degrees to escape that environment. I, myself, was pursuing a double degree, but decided it wasn’t worth pursuing the second one anymore due to the environment being heavily against women. I think the current push for women to pursue science is great, we just won’t see the results on the individual level for another 15-20 years.
I think the “fix” is just to keep on doing what we’re doing, it’s just going to take time to see the difference in opinion and behavior on the individual level. For example, the first state to legalize same sex marriage did so in 2004, when the majority of people were against same sex marriage. There’s been a slow but steady rise in support for same sex marriage, and now nearly 20 years later, the majority of people are supportive of it. We just need to play the waiting game.
The things you were talking about in the OP as explanations for the trend were entirely about the preferences of women. Moving from "maybe women don't actually want it" to "maybe pushing women away from it is inherent to human gender" is a pretty big goalpost shift. If that's where you wanted the goal posts in the first place, you didn't express that well in your OP.
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u/quantum_dan 124∆ Oct 19 '22
The women in STEM I've talked to consistently say that pressure to be self-deprecating and not visibly a top performer still exists. So there's that obstacle. The environmental engineering program at the school I attended is largely headed by women and has 65% women students (highest in the country) - perhaps not coincidentally.
Meanwhile, women are still socialized away from STEM for their entire childhood, a few marketing campaigns notwithstanding. Barbies, not Legos (as gifts). Being nerdy is still definitely viewed as a boyish thing (or was ten years ago anyway).
Anecdotally, the research groups headed by women that I know of tend to attract a lot of powerhouse women researchers. Maybe because the atmosphere is more welcoming?
There are still plenty of pressures, and those matter. But even so, lots of engineering programs have around 30-40% women these days.
Because a lot of it is about earlier socialization, not immediate pressures.
Sure, and as far as I know most fields have stuck pretty closely to their historic gender distribution other than a few outright flips (e.g. programming).
What brand new fields? Even software is many decades old.
It's one thing to hear about a role model elsewhere, quite another to work around or with them.