The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/
Sigh.
The problem with conclusions like these is that they assume that the development of girls’ (and boys’) “interests” and “preferences” develop in a vacuum, as if they are not shaped by the sociological expectations of the culture in which they are raised. For example:
Sure, many girls will have zero interest in science. And if life did occur in a vacuum, more girls may be uninterested in science than boys. But we also can’t deny that boys are raised to value the traits and practices and behaviors that align more with science (experimenting with things, using their hands, getting dirty), and boys are encouraged more to pursue STEM careers than girls are by their teachers in parents - often in unconscious and somewhat invisible ways. There are studies that show that teachers call on boys more in math and science classes and are more likely to ascribe their achievement in these fields to innate talent. There are also lots of studies showing that teachers and parents both simply expect boys to be better in those fields and that girls are often unconsciously discouraged by the adults in their lives from doing things that lead to fluency in tech fields or desire to enter tech fields.
For example, I often see young women - sometimes on this very website - coming here worried because they want to do X career, but some adult in their life has told them to think carefully about having flexibility so they have time to take care of children they don’t have and may never have. Boys are never told to worry about that and I have never seen a young man ask the same questions.
Conversely, girls are expected to have strong verbal skills - studies show that their parents speak more words to them and they’re more often picked to read in class. Depictions of girls in movies, television, and other media show girls as verbal creatures - always chattering, traveling in groups - everything in girls’ lives tells them they are expected to master verbal skills. So it’s really no surprise when they do, and when their verbal skills are better than their science skills.
Also, I don’t have access to the original article, but the other thing that is probably true is that women and girls in more gender-equal societies are more likely to have careers in general and have some measure of choice over what they can do. A girl growing up in Finland or Norway or the United States expects to have a career. A girl growing up in Algeria, Turkey, or Tunisia is likely not expected to have a career at all, and if she does have one, it’s not likely to be one that requires a college education.
It’s possible that only girls who show more “masculine” traits (i.e., liking science and engineering) are allowed to go to college in the first place, perhaps because that earned them the favor of the male relative who is in charge of determining their life. Or maybe their male relatives/family members would only allow them to attend college if they have the opportunity to earn more money (by studying a STEM field) that way than they would through marriage. Either way, assuming that women in Algeria and Georgia and Tunisia have the same level of free ‘choice’ to pick their careers as women in more gender-equal countries and then trying to draw some conclusion based on that doesn’t seem like a great sociological choice.
Do not agree with the above article at all. My daughter is more into math and science; she matches and is enrolled higher level math than the boys in her class. She is not into competition math as she loves solving puzzles and a deep thinker. She has been allowed to skip grades in math and science as her interest starting to develop at early age. Teachers, mentors have always nurtured and never ever told her she can not do anything. She always took classes with older boys in those subjects and did very well. And our school is very well known, but faculty have been always supporting even they bend rules to acoomodate her interests and she proved them right by working hard and scoring very well.
My very bright D2 was peppered with science gifts, camps, etc from an early age. She is a Physics PhD student now. I think I’d have made an excellent scientist, but got NO encouragement in that direction as a kid or teen, and do something else (although IT related) for a career. It is very cultural.
I started out in the computer industry when there were many many women in the field. As time went on, the culture of CS became distinctly hostile to women…corresponding directly to the influx of money and rise of the bro-culture in Silicon Valley. This has been discussed and written about ad nauseum so no need to rehash it, but suffice to say: women did not suddenly become genetically disinclined towards CS, we did become suddenly unwelcome.
Because the shift happened so quickly, it’s easier to see this objectively in CS. Other fields of science and tech have excluded women for centuries which makes it easier for people to draw lazy conclusions. But the principle is the same.
The culture of CS itself has changed a lot I believe, from mostly coding to get things done to coding for the sake of creating beautiful fancy code which may be more attractive to men (not necessarily a change for the better, as anyone who has struggled to find their way around yet another zillion-dollar website can tell you).
Talking about cultural expectations in general, I’m sure they’re very different in different pats of the country. I’m sure there are areas (more rural and traditional) where girls are discouraged from going into STEM fields, and there are others where they’re actively encouraged (I can see this around me).