<p>Indeed, there are folks on cc (ahem) that frequently question the need for AP Calc for their D…the issue then becomes, with a weak(er) math background, such Frosh are relegated to non-STEM fields, or have to really struggle to catch up. And with the mandatory STEM curves, that makes it a GPA-killer, not to mention high personal frustration. This is true, even if such a student takes a liking to STEM while in college.</p>
<p>AP used to publish tests by gender, and if I recall, nearly 60% of Calc BC students were guys…2/3rds of Physics B students are guys…90% in Comp Sci are guys. OTOH, AP Bio is more than half female, and Enviro (the so-called AP Lite) is ~65% female…</p>
The ASEE study mentioned that during 2011, 31% of bachelor’s engineering degrees at GW were given to women. The 2 schools with the highest percent women were Olin College of Engineering and MIT (both below 50). I’d expect both of these ratios, along with most schools near the top, were enhanced by admissions favoring underrepresented groups. For example, the MIT overall student body has a good gender balance at 55/45. However, the applicants do not have this male/female ratio. In a post a few years ago, it was mentioned that “MIT accepted 29.3% of its female candidates but only 11.6 % of the males.” Using this type of admissions enhancement, a selective college can create whatever gender ratio it wants for its tech programs (with some variation for schools where it is easy to switch to a non-tech field).</p>
<p>Most engineering schools have preferential admission for women, so that is not the reason why MIT has a more balanced ratio. </p>
<p>Also, an imbalance in admission percentage does not mean one gender is preferred. Caltech has historically had no gender AA, but has always had pretty disparate admission rates for males and females. More males apply to MIT and Caltech who are longshots, whereas females don’t bother applying unless they are very strong candidates; that is, the females “self-select.” There is some preference going on at MIT, but you can’t figure out how strong the bias is by looking at the statistics that MIT releases.</p>
<p>Who said it has anything to do with transmitting the data as part of learning? Being in a group of all males in a STEM environment with the added testosterone/brashness that tends to come with that is pretty uncomfortable for many women. It is exhausting to deal with over time. I have worked in a STEM environment for over 30 years, and can say that men tend to overestimate their own abilities, hog the credit, and discount women’s input on a regular basis. Of course there are exceptions – but I would say that 8 of 10 men I have worked with fit that description. And as a consultant, I have dealt with literally hundreds of men in the IT field. I don’t think it is the subject matter keeping women from sticking with STEM – I think it is still cultural a lot of the time. Having more women peers and mentors would have a big impact on keeping women in the STEM fields.</p>
This is also observed in my workplace. In the strongly male-dominated countries (especially, the Middle East), multi-nationals prefer to hire the local women over the local men, because the local men think they know everything and tend to be lazy, arrogant jerks full of a sense of entitlement.</p>
Let’s compare MIT and Stanford. They are both highly selective schools and are usually ranked among the top 2 in engineering. One would expect the vast majority of engineering candidates from both schools to be highly qualified. Both schools have a decent gender balance across the full school, yet the gender balance among engineering classes differs dramatically between the two. It was my experience at Stanford that the gender balance roughly matched the overall rates in the US as listed in ASEE, which includes ~10% in certain fields and under 20% overall. This fits with the ASEE report not listing Stanford among the schools with a large portion of engineering degrees given to women. Yet MIT had one of the best gender ratios in the United States and more than twice Stanford’s ratio.</p>
<p>Sure it’s possible that MIT engineering female applicants are much stronger than male applicants, and Stanford female engineering applicants are not. But I think the more likely explanation is that the female/male ratio being more than 2.5x the US average stems from the admit rate for females being 2.6x the admit rate for males . It wouldn’t make as much sense to enhance admit rate at Stanford. They naturally have a better gender balance across the full school since most students are not engineering majors. They also permit open enrollment between different fields, which could lead to some students listing an engineering major simply to increase chance of admission, then easily switching to another field after becoming a matriculated student.</p>
<p>According to the College Board stats I posted earlier, women DON’T stop earlier nor are they “no good” - they take higher level math than boys and their HS grades in math are higher.</p>
<p>@data10: I don’t really know, but I think some of the effect has to do with what are the most mainstream majors at Stanford vs. MIT. At MIT, engineering is obviously a pretty common major, even among people who are lukewarm about it. As a consequence, many people who think they will ultimately end up in business, consulting, law, or medicine, end up majoring in engineering. At Stanford, I would guess this would be less common; some of the same people might instead opt for a bio/anthropology double-major, for instance.</p>
<p>The other possible cause is that the departments in which Stanford is the strongest tend to be more male-dominated: electrical engineering, computer science, and some others. The most popular engineering majors among women tend to be chemical engineering and more bio-related engineering. I don’t know about bio-engineering at Stanford, but chemical engineering is not that strong at Stanford compared to its other tech disciplines, or perhaps more importantly, its chemistry department. I don’t know if there are actually more people enrolled in EE, CS than chem E, but it could explain the gender disparity if chem E and similar departments are much smaller.</p>
<p>“Who said it has anything to do with transmitting the data as part of learning? Being in a group of all males in a STEM environment with the added testosterone/brashness that tends to come with that is pretty uncomfortable for many women. It is exhausting to deal with over time. I have worked in a STEM environment for over 30 years, and can say that men tend to overestimate their own abilities, hog the credit, and discount women’s input on a regular basis. Of course there are exceptions – but I would say that 8 of 10 men I have worked with fit that description.”</p>
<p>@intparent
I cant comment on your experience in a STEM related consulting industry, since I am a graduate student, but what exactly do you think these “male dominated” STEM university classes are like? Do you think the male professors and students are beating their chests and shouting while doing equations in chemistry101 due to their testosterone? Seriously, a chemistry or physics or math class with a male teacher is no more “brash” than any other class on campus, and in my experience is structured and taught pretty similarly to the life sciences, except with (obviously) more of a math emphasis.</p>
<p>Also I take issue with your claim about how men in STEM fields “overestimate their own abilities, hog the credit, and discount women’s input on a regular basis.” At least in academia this is BS. At least for science the peer review system is gender blind and the value of theories a person generates is based on the strength your argument and of the evidence that supports it. If 8 out of 10 men in YOUR company are like you describes then this means your company is hiring the wrong type of people, not that men in science are overconfident credit hogging bigots.</p>
<p>MIT studied the women they accepted and found that women were doing as well in courses as men even though they had lower scores, which explains some of the difference in acceptance rate. But I also think that as one of the top tech schools in the country they can choose to create a class that is 50% women without compromising the quality of the class. I have no problem with that even though they rejected my boy. One of the attractions of MIT over other tech schools is that it has an attractive M/F ratio.</p>
<p>I also took issue with this generalization. It has not been my experience at all that men were more aggressive than females in STEM, either in classes or in my career.</p>
<p>Well, that’s why I used the word “historically” when saying Caltech historically had no gender AA. I thought they had always had higher admission rates for women, even when they said they had no AA. </p>
<p>Someone told me that recently the Common Data Set said race and gender were “considered” for Caltech. This was not the case before, so their policies may have changed.</p>
<p>Namelessstatistic, do you even know what a consultant does? This is experience in over 20 companies in the past 30 years, not just one company. And of course they aren’t beating their chests in class (most of the time) – but my D’s experience in STEM classes is often the boys are grabbing the lab equipment so they can be the one to carry out the physical part of the experiment in their group, speaking over other students regularly, and sometimes making snide remarks about the female students. And their male teachers seem fine with this. But the boys are also quick to take advantage of asking for notes the girls took or looking at their lab writeups. </p>
<p>At the engineering camp she attended last summer, D’s group (all female) was the only one in the history of the camp to solve a specific engineering program that had been attempted several times before – but I talked to the other two (all male) groups who worked on the same problem, and you would think from their posters/presentations that they HAD solved the problem. But they actually had not… I am not sure if they even knew they hadn’t done it – or were just blowing egotistical smoke.</p>
<p>Your post smacks of a young man who never even noticed what goes on in a primarily male group because you are in the majority. It seems perfectly normal to you. But to women it does not. And you can hardly blame a lot of them for rolling their eyes and looking for a different way to spend their education and career time. To the detriment of the STEM community, IMHO.</p>
<p>I recently ran into a guy I know who hires engineers for a company that build rockets recently (he is the manager of an engineering group). He told me they snap up any female engineer they find because adding even one female engineer (even an intern) to a group of male engineers exponentially increases the communication factor within the group and external to the group. Skills the guys find to be a waste of time, but that are invaluable in the eyes of the boss. When I look at these all male IT teams stumbling around and repeating work and/or just doing the wrong work because no one bothers to communicate about it, I know that adding more women to the mix would make their team so much more productive. But they would all say there is nothing wrong with how their team works now… because they haven’t seen anything better. They just think blind alleys, screwed up production deployments, and wasted resources is how the world has to work because they don’t have the skills to fix the problems. Sheesh.</p>