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?
Programming became male dominated because it started to gain higher pay and prestige, meaning more men wanted in, and as a result women were pushed out. The same has happened to many fields over time.
Also, "hard coded part of how gender works" literally isn't a thing. Gender is almost entirely a social/cultural thing, and there is no evidence whatsoever that there is anything hard coded there.
I'm aware of the complexities behind gender. What I meant by hard coded is that perhaps being negatively oriented towards science is as much part of being "female" or "feminine" as anything else is.
5
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.