<p>Sevmom…agreed…some male engineers are fine socially, and some female engineers are not.</p>
<p>I was just posting my daughter’s perception. And despite being a capable engineering major, she has decided not to pursue this as a career.</p>
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<p>But she hasn’t mentioned anything like that, and I think its inaccurate to assume that this sort of discrimination would occur in the majority of cases. From her posts, it sounds like her daughter thinks it would be sort of weird to be around so many boys, not because of fear of some kind of discrimination.</p>
<p>Anyway, people of all genders tend to encounter some kind of resistance when they put themselves in a “higher” position, by being one of the best or most advanced students. We should all try to lessen these types of attempts to hold talented students back. However, as individuals, you have to learn to ignore it.</p>
<p>I am still at a lost in understanding why the gender distribution of the class and faculty is such a problem for the children of some of the posters in this thread. Most of the psychology courses I took in my undergrad where about 70% female and with a female professor. It didn’t detract from my learning experience in in the course, nor the experience of any of the other men I knew in those classes, so I don’t now why the inverse would not be true for a female engineering student. I mean if the teacher is sexist or something I definitely understand the complaint, but I don’t really understand how the gender distribution of a class in and of itself causes suffering. Would someone please explain to me why it is so damaging for a woman to be in a class with more male students and a male teacher?</p>
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<p>I think the fact that her 6th grade teacher nominated her for the advanced class probably says a lot about this particular girl, at least, being encouraged to do math. </p>
<p>I am not sure if her decision not to do it (I was not consulted) was because she’d have felt weird or she felt she’d face discrimination. I don’t think she thought the boys in that class would be mean to her or anything, I think she just didn’t want to be the only girl. In any case, she did it in 8th grade and will take Calc as a senior and is doubling up on science this year, so she has no fear of “STEM”, at least in high school. Whether “American Culture is pushing her out of STEM” remains to be seen, I suppose.</p>
<p>NamelessStatistic…My D was 11 years old when she made this decision. She could have thought “boys are yucky” for all I know. As to college…I myself was a social science major with about 50-50 classes and professors of both genders, so I can’t really speak to that. My sociology background might suggest that being the only woman in a class full of men and a male teacher means that woman is going to be ignored or ridiculed or some way not taken seriously, but I really have no firsthand info on that.</p>
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Although your daughter’s situation was in middle, I have been in advance courses where there are 30 of us and there are at most 10 girls. It was weird for us and I didn’t feel like I was the minority. (If we’re talking race, I definitely was the minority. 2 black people in the entire class!) The majority of the girls were the top performers. The girls were the driving force in the class. I have also been to a physics workshop where there were 30 guys and and 5 girls. 5. We noticed that we were outnumbered, but we were far more vocal and involved.</p>
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That’s the thing. It isn’t damaging. At least, I don’t think so. However, if someone does think so, please explain.</p>
<p>NameleStatistic, for me as an undergrad the question came up: Why are there no women faculty at all? Is there something that I don’t know about yet, that is keeping women from becoming faculty members? In math, I had no women professors, although I believe that there were 2 on the faculty (out of about 75). In physics, I had no women professors. In computer science, I had no women professors. In chemistry, I had no women professors. In biology, I had no women professors.</p>
<p>Out of approximately 60 courses that I took as an undergrad (on the quarter system), I had two women professors–the first, in history, during spring quarter of my sophomore year. The course schedule listed only last name. I was actually startled when I realized that the distinguished fifty-ish woman who had just walked into the classroom was Professor [LastName].</p>
<p>It is not so much that the interactions are different or that the amount learned is different, when the professor is of the opposite gender. Indeed, I think this makes almost no difference. It is the near absence of female role models that is problematic, I think.</p>
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<p>Same question, but females in STEM?</p>
<p>@QuantMech: What university were you in that had so few female professors, especially in Biology? I don’t mean to pry but did you go to University in the 50s or 60s or is this a more recent experience? Even in the traditionally male dominated subjects i took such as chemistry and statistics I had at least one female lecturer.</p>
<p>I guess I must just be an oddity in that I don’t care in the slightest about the gender of my professors or supervisor as long as they were good at what they did. Then again I really did not look to professors as role models, so maybe that is it. For that mater however, why couldn’t a woman have a male role model in academia or vice-versa? I get the need for same gender role models at the elementary and high school ages where the school experience is significantly more social then academic but do students really view professors as archetypes of successful male or female roles? In my experience the students around me were more apt to view professors based on their academic achievements and teaching prowess rather than to model their lives off them.</p>
<p>Early 70’s. Admittedly, I did not take very many biology courses, and might have run into some women faculty in STEM if I had taken more.</p>
<p>@bluebayou
As a male who had one of his majors in psychology no one told me I wasn’t good enough to be a psychologist if i wanted to (I didn’t) because I was male. None of my female friends in STEM fields were ever told anything of the sort either from my understanding.</p>
<p>I sincerely doubt that such such situations are common.</p>
<p>I took a look at the web page for the Department of Mathematics at Harvard, and looked at the people listed as Senior Faculty (basically, the tenured faculty). I count 24, of whom 2 are women. One is a Full Professor and the other is Professor of the Practice of Mathematics (a title that only she holds among the senior faculty). There are 18 men among the Full Professors and 4 men among the Professors Emeriti. I suspect that the numbers at other top schools will look fairly similar, although other places may have a few more women at the senior level. At the junior level, there are quite a few more women. Harvard has a relatively poor record for tenuring its junior faculty, although that has been improving recently.</p>
<p>In the Department of Mathematics at Stanford, there are 35 men (with photos) listed as being on the faculty, and 4 women. This includes untenured faculty, I think. There are 7 people for whom there is no photo, and whose gender was not evident to me from the name.</p>
<p>@QuantMech</p>
<p>Do you know what the M/F faculty ratios are in Harvard or Stanford across all departments? Is it roughly 50/50?</p>
<p>Do you believe this is a discrimination of hiring problem or just that their are more male professionals in these fields and hence more professors in these fields that are male since the hiring pool for them is larger?</p>
<p>In the Department of Mathematics at Princeton, looking at the faculty members who are Assistant Professors and up (that is, not counting Instructors or Research Fellows or the like), I found 31 men, 10 emeriti (all men, I think), two women, and 6 whose gender I could not determine from the name, in the absence of a picture.</p>
<p>But wait! One of the two women, Sophie Morel, is also shown on the Harvard mathematics faculty page!</p>
<p>I suspect that mathematics will probably be one of the last areas in which the “natural” ratio of women to men is achieved.</p>
<p>I doubt that the faculty ratios at Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton come close to 50/50 across all departments. I truly don’t know what accounts for the small numbers of women in mathematics departments. While interest in mathematics is probably not equal among girls and boys, observationally I don’t think that among children interest in math is as sharply skewed toward males, as the numbers of math faculty members by gender would suggest. </p>
<p>If I were an undergraduate woman now with an interest in mathematics, I would feel that the odds were somewhat against my becoming a professor in a top department, because it just hasn’t seemed to happen much. Other women undergrads might not be affected in that way–more power to them, definitely!</p>
<p>Are there really “natural” ratios for universities to strive for? I mean there are so many different factors that shape a student’s potential career interest outside of the university’s control (TV and social media being the prime examples in my opinion), I am not sure that any of these “unnatural” 50/50 ratios are due to anyone having the odds stacked against them at an institutional level (just as I am not convinced that bias in teaching styles in the elementary and high school education systems has led to the male educational “gap”). Thus if universities attempt to artificially establish even M/F ratios in various departments may be in fact be stacking the odds against one specific group.</p>
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You clearly don’t hang out with the right people. I was on the hiring committee for our local elementary school. We had three teachers to replace, two of them men, and a high priority was to try to find good men to replace them. Sadly we didn’t - there wasn’t a single one who applied for the positions that we could recommend in good conscience.</p>
<p>Spatial tests are nothing like the math part of the SAT. I was always very good at them - not so surprising that I went into architecture. Here’s a sample: [Talent</a> Search Testing - Spatial Test Battery (STB) | JHU CTY](<a href=“http://cty.jhu.edu/talent/testing/about/stb.html]Talent”>http://cty.jhu.edu/talent/testing/about/stb.html)</p>
<p>I don’t think the fact that males get higher math scores on the SAT than females says they are necessarily better at math - it’s still up for debate what part is nature vs nurture. I think it’s much more culturally acceptable for girls to say they are no good at math, or don’t like math and to stop at an earlier point in math. Remember the “math class is tough” Barbie? At least there was an outcry about it.</p>
<p>In today’s world, self selection is the largest factor. When the kids were young, I was active in a chess club. There was no appreciable difference between the elementary school boys and girls, but by middle school girls just stopped coming and we were lucky to have one or two high school girls show up because there just wasn’t any critical mass from a social standpoint. Same story in our table tennis club - the 6/7 year old girls would come, but there would be no 15-16 year olds. </p>
<p>Much more anecdotal, but at home I would set up experiments to play with - things like simple chemistry, electrical circuits, and programming on DOS PCs. The girls just didn’t care to have anything to do with transistors or capacitors, and especially the algebra of complex numbers behind them. Same with programming - they didn’t mind creating web pages with HTML (we didn’t really have the tools we have today), but no serious programming. In the end, DS decided to double major in comp sci/elec engg while the two girls headed towards biological sciences. </p>
<p>And I don’t think it’s only my family. When DD2 was checking out colleges a few years ago, we looked at Vet schools and this wasn’t too unusual:<br>
[Women</a> in Veterinary Medicine](<a href=“http://www.veterinarypracticenews.com/vet-cover-stories/women-in-veterinary-medicine.aspx]Women”>Stop Spammers)
“•This year, women hold 78 percent of veterinary school seats, according to the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges”</p>
<p>Is anyone blaming “American Culture” for pushing out the boys? I would say about as much “American Culture” is pushing out girls in the areas where they are underrepresented.</p>
<p>GW may not be a top engineering school, but they boasted on our tour that they have a 50/50 ratio. Tufts has a small engineering department, I don’t know its M/F ratio, but the university is certainly 50/50. And the young woman I know who did engineering at Tufts loved it. BTW, one reason she was well prepared, was that I encouraged her mother to have her join my son in skipping 6th grade math. It had never occurred to them to ask. And our middle school was very averse to anyone changing the way things were always done.</p>