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If you had the ability to follow a logical argument you would realize that I did not imply anything otherwise.
If you favor girls over boys at any step in the process then yes, obviously you are rigging the system. People are already free to decide their own path in life.
There should be no favoritism, and that is the point. If you think there aren't societal factors that dissuade women to go into STEM fields than you're burying your head in the sand.
There should be no favoritism, and that is the point. If you think there aren't societal factors that dissuade women to go into STEM fields than you're burying your head in the sand.
Okay I'll bite. Back up your claim. Please provide examples where women are dissuaded from pursuing STEM.
Look for people to either become over worked and unhappy when women are always taking maternity leave.
Look for people to become over worked and unhappy when men are always taking medical leave on account of knee injuries sustained while playing football.
Please please please let's not discuss the race and gender disparity within sports especially at the pro level. I know let's start some special programs designed to introduce football and basketball to asian children!
Ah errr... uhmmm... sorry, sorry... ( *slowly fading into the background*))))
Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.
The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?
Many of the factors driving women employees from STEM fields have nothing to do with family, according to a study conducted by the Society of Women Engineers.
The study, which anonymously surveyed 3,200 engineers across four major companies (3M, Booz Allen Hamilton, Honeywell Aerospace and United Technologies Corp.), focused on values and perceptions of corporate culture in an attempt to find out why so many women leave jobs in the science, technology, engineering and math fields within a decade of entering the STEM workforce when their male counterparts do not. With that knowledge, SWE aimed to identify actionable steps companies in those fields can take to combat attrition among female employees.
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The study showed that both men and women feel that bureaucracy and hierarchy are impeding employees from achieving what they are there to accomplish. But Michaels said that men are likely to endure the dissatisfaction and continue working. However, when women notice what they consider to be unnecessary obstacles to their work, they tend to end up leaving for another career.
Even at the high school level, teachers and classmates sometimes stereotype girls who are interested in advanced physics and math. Pollack spoke to Yale physics undergrads and heard these stories:
One young woman had been disconcerted to find herself one of only three girls in her AP physics course in high school, and even more so when the other two dropped out. Another student was the only girl in her AP physics class from the start. Her classmates teased her mercilessly: "You're a girl. Girls can't do physics." She expected the teacher to put an end to the teasing, but he didn't.
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"When girls see opportunities for themselves in science, technology, engineering and math, they're more likely to take higher math in high school and more likely to pursue those careers," researcher Janet Hyde, from the University of Wisconsin, said in a press release.
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2. A Lack of Encouragement
Lovelace herself was encouraged to pursue math by her mother, to avoid the "dangerous poetic tendencies" of her father, the poet Lord Byron, according to The New York Times' Bits blog. This could be why she shed the female stereotype and pursued her STEM interests.
As Pollack, herself a physics major who didn't go into academia, writes: "I didn't go on in physics because not a single professor — not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school."
She graduated at the top of her class, but none of her professors even asked if she was going to graduate school.
Studies have shown that when told that men score better in math tests than women, women tend to score worse. When told that isn't true, the two genders scored equally well.
This might come from an "internal bias" in the minds of young female scientists, who may naturally under-rate their intelligence. Whether that's a cultural concoction or a difference in how female brain responds to encouragement, we don't know yet.
"Women need more positive reinforcement, and men need more negative reinforcement. Men wildly overestimate their learning abilities, their earning abilities. Women say, 'Oh, I'm not good, I won't earn much, whatever you want to give me is O.K.,'" Yale physicist Meg Urry told Pollack.
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3. Stereotypes
But, in other ways, women are being held back by stereotypes. In the hugely popular television show "The Big Bang Theory," female scientists are forced into "weirdo" roles, while the non-scientist is the only "normal" female character.
computer science stereotypes and women Cheryan, et. al, Sex Roles, 2013.
These stereotypes also extend into how we portray male scientists. Research has indicated that when females are exposed to nerdy white-guy stereotypes, it discourages them from STEM fields.
Studies have shown that when young women hear about a non-stereotypical computer scientist, their interest in the field increases.
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4. Childcare
Even if young women make it through a bachelor's and enter academia, they often leave the STEM fields early in their career. A frequently suggested reason for this is the lack of maternity leave and childcare after having kids. This is also seen in the long-hour days of technology startups.
Tenure-track academics face steep obstacles in reaching their goals, and taking a "time-out" to have children is still a problem at many institutions. Astrophysicist and MacArthur "genius" grant award winner Sara Seager, of MIT, says she will use her $625,000 award to pay for childcare to help her concentrate on her work. If this wasn't an issue facing academics, she wouldn't need to put her winnings toward it.
There are indications that having children isn't the main reason women leave STEM fields mid-career — after all, startups and academia allow flexible days and plenty of work from home opportunities — it does seem to become an issue for some research-minded women.
A study by Berkeley researchers found that 41% of women postdocs who had babies retreated from their original goal of being a research professor, versus 20% of single women.
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6. Marginalization
Even if women do find themselves a faculty position, they are frequently paid less than their male counterparts, given less lab and office space, get fewer awards for their work, and given access to fewer resources, an MIT committee found.
Women software developers earn 80% of what men do.
These figures hold true in larger studies, including one from the American Institute of Physics looking at 15,000 physicists in 130 countries. "In almost all cultures, the female scientists received less financing, lab space, office support and grants for equipment and travel, even after the researchers controlled for differences other than sex," Pollack wrote.
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7. Bias
This marginalization is likely the result of bias. Women in the STEM fields face a constant bias against them, not just from male colleagues, but also from females.
For example, when presented with identical lab manager resumes from either a John or a Jennifer both male and female professors tended to pick the John as the better candidate, and offer him more money for the position.
As Johnathon Mohr points out on twitter, this bias is sometimes built into the "good old boy" network of tenured professors. If males are the majority of researchers that make it into the later stage of a research career, then they are making the decisions of who will get tenure, and hired for higher-level positions and awards.
This also crops up in male-driven Silicon Valley, where female entrepreneurs find getting funding hard to do because they aren't perceived as leaders, but as mothers. Women only start about 8% of venture-backed tech startups.
You mentioned there that there are issues to tackle at degree level and the school level, where do you think it goes wrong? When is it that girls stop wanting to study STEM subjects?
What the evidence shows is that girls are affected by gender stereotyping from wider society but also within schools themselves. What tends to happen is, as young people go through puberty, both boys and girls tend to conform to the stereotype of their gender that they see around them and the stereotype for women tends to be against the kind of woman that chooses to pursue physical sciences and engineering.
There is evidence from the work that we carried out at the Institute of Physics that shows that whether a girl chooses to do A-level physics depends strongly on they type of school she attends. For example, single-sex schools tend to have higher numbers of girls that scientific subjects on. It is also important to see if a school is countering gender stereotyping across a wide range of subjects. If the boys aren’t doing drama, it is unlikely that the girls are doing physics
So what is going on to put young girls off when it comes to studying STEM?
Rewired State founder Emma Mulqueeny had an experience which I think throws light on one problem area. She decided to run a campaign to encourage more girls to sign up for the Young Rewired State hack weekends. By drawing attention to the gender disparity they actually experienced a fall in female registrants from 5% to 3%. In an interview with the Guardian in 2012, Emma Mulqueeny, said:
‘’It was because I shed light on it being a more male thing, and that’s like social suicide. They think you’ll only get nerdy girls if its boy dominated’’
In the end they engaged actress Lily Cole as a judge for the event and sign ups for girls rose to 23%.
My own experience supports Mulqueeny’s theory. I speak frequently at schools and education events and mostly the teenagers I speak to just want to blend in and get on with dealing with the messy business of being an awkward, hormone-dogged teenager. The last thing they want to do is something that marks them as different and potentially makes them a target.
In the case of girls there is the added problem of something called Stereotype threat. Research has shown that, in environments where women are greatly outnumbered, or expected not to perform as well as their male counterparts because of gender bias, the pressure of not conforming to negative stereotype perceptions can actually cause them to screw up. So we’re kind of damned from the outset until people stop thinking like this… and that includes the way we think about ourselves.
Interestingly it seems like girls in all-female education are significantly more likely to choose STEM subjects. And I don’t believe it’s just down to the absence of boys but rather the absence of an expectation that the subject won’t appeal to them. This expectation may be wholly abhorrent to anyone with concerns about gender bias, but it is a fact of the past few decades of unconscious conditioning and the notion is reinforced by the lack of female students currently in the classroom. Everyone I have ever spoken to about this, who studied STEM subjects in an all-girl education envirionment, have said they didn’t even realise it was male dominated until they left school
As you can see, lots of people have been looking into this for a while - and there are a lot of ways that women (or girls when they're younger) could be turned off of STEM in ways that are unrelated to their actual ability to do the work. We have come a long way from where we are, and there are many STEM fields that actually have more women than men - but I think we can even things out by addressing some of these chokepoints. And I think that does mean that we need to do a better job on the opposite end in addressing why men might not be going into more women-dominated areas.
None of this means that men in the process - I'm a male scientist, and I certainly don't want to see myself sacrificed - it just means that we show all girls what STEM is about, show them that they can do it (if they want to), and show them how to do it. The girls (and then women) that are interested stay in it, and the ones that aren't go off into the many other fields out there.
Last edited by HockeyMac18; 02-18-2017 at 12:39 AM..
How is it illegal to hire whatever candidate you want?
And they have done this study despite your ignorance of it. And whatever weird bitterness you have.
We're talking about blindly looking at resumes without seeing the candidate and basing your decision for hiring solely on the name at the top. And God help you if you have some kind of ethnic name.
These are very well borne-out studies that have been done for a long time.
Now, that being said, I'm not sure I can go along with purposely only hiring one gender over the other. Even if it is to try to correct something that happened in the past. It might be better just to eliminate the heading with name and sex on it while judging credentials.
Have a link to the study(ies) and who paid for it/them?
To see how the credentials of job applicants affect discrimination, the authors varied the quality of the resumes they used in response to a given ad. Higher quality applicants were given a little more labor market experience on average and fewer holes in their employment history. They were also portrayed as more likely to have an email address, to have completed some certification degree, to possess foreign language skills, or to have been awarded some honors.
In total, the authors responded to more than 1,300 employment ads in the sales, administrative support, clerical, and customer services job categories, sending out nearly 5,000 resumes. The ads covered a large spectrum of job quality, from cashier work at retail establishments and clerical work in a mailroom to office and sales management positions.
The results indicate large racial differences in callback rates to a phone line with a voice mailbox attached and a message recorded by someone of the appropriate race and gender. Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. This would suggest either employer prejudice or employer perception that race signals lower productivity.
The 50 percent gap in callback rates is statistically very significant, Bertrand and Mullainathan note in Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination (NBER Working Paper No. 9873). It indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience. Race, the authors add, also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower quality resumes. But the positive impact of a better resume for those with Africa-American names was much smaller.
"While one may have expected that improved credentials may alleviate employers' fear that African-American applicants are deficient in some unobservable skills, this is not the case in our data," the authors write. "Discrimination therefore appears to bite twice, making it harder not only for African-Americans to find a job but also to improve their employability."
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