<p>The percent of bachelor’s degrees in physics earned by women is about 21% and has hovered around there for about 10 years, as of 2010. (Although it was between 10% and 15% in the 80s.)</p>
<p>I don’t see how you can look at that number and conclude that there is a major discrepancy in the skills needed to succeed in physics. I also can’t agree that 21% is OK because women simply don’t like physics. Even if I thought such a reductive statement could be true I would wonder how it came about and think: what are we losing when more 80% of the people getting physics degrees are men?</p>
MIT mentions that 13% of grads applied to med school and 6% of grads applied to law school. Stanford has notably higher percentages, and some Stanford pre-med students choose bioengineering or biomedical engineering, so one could argue that the larger pre-med population at Stanford would increase the percent of women in engineering. However, I’d expect instead most pre-med students favor majoring in hard sciences over engineering at both schools since there is a better overlap with required classes and more free electives for pre-med requirements.</p>
<p>
If the difference in ratio was caused by the Stanford bio/chem engineering not being strong enough, then we’d expect to see a larger degree of distortion for those majors and a smaller degree of distortion in electrical & computer engineering. However, it’s often the other way around. A post a few years ago mentioned 41/59 ratio for EE at MIT, which is 3.6x the overall national ratio in EE mentioned in the ASEE paper. In contrast the ratio across all engineering departments is 2.5x the national average.</p>
<p>@intparent
“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”
Read my previous posts in this thread before you comment. Many of my psychology classes were female dominated, and although my graduate molecular biology laboratory is about 60% male the supervisor is a woman.<br>
I have been in BOTH situations of being in the minority and the majority gender in classes and I can say that there really is no appreciable difference in the quality or style of education.</p>
<p>As to the competition for laboratory equipment: this is par for the courses in science. There are finite resources even within laboratories so people compete for laboratory equipment (my lab has a strict first come first server sign up sheet which is constantly full) just as different laboratories compete for funding. From my experience the women in science I know are just as able to compete as the men are. </p>
<p>Congratulations to your daughters summer group I am glad they did well at camp. I am sorry that your experience there was tarnished by those bad, bad boys who weren’t as clever as your daughter.</p>
<p>Yes us poor idiot males are completely incapable of communicating to each other at all, without the help of some benevolent female to lead us. We are all just idiot Homer Simpsons and Ray Barones who cannot function without a woman’s guidance.<br>
Of course I would like to see more women take an interest in STEM fields, mainly because I would like to see more people in general get excited to do fields like chemistry and physics and molecular biology because they are taught in the most boring way possible at a high school level (but this is a talk for another thread), but I take issue to your claims that males are incapable of functioning as a group without a female presence. Drawing on the “men cant communicate stereotype” is a cliched trope that is confined to sitcoms, not real life.</p>
<p>But what the hell would I know? Odds are I am part of that 80% of males in STEM fields who you say are arrogant bigots, so feel free to continue write off my input as you claim the men around you do to women like you.</p>
<p>In the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, a poll was done that showed that 80% of white respondents felt that there was little to no racial discrimination in this country; 80% of blacks said that there was. One’s perception of discrimination has much to do with whether one has been on the receiving end of it, and there is very little value in a member of the majority averring that he has never seen any sign of such discrimination, himself, or even that he is sure he was never guilty of such a thing. To use one’s experience as a member of the majority to negate or to ridicule the experience of a member of the minority seems to me a perfect example of discrimination, all by itself. </p>
<p>If your daughter is interested in engineering without the disadvantage of having to deal with adolescent male egos, she might check out the Picker Program in Engineering at Smith College, the first and still the only engineering program at a women’s college. I have met several of the professors, as well as some of the students, and I was very impressed.</p>
<p>"One’s perception of discrimination has much to do with whether one has been on the receiving end of it, and there is very little value in a member of the majority averring that he has never seen any sign of such discrimination, himself, or even that he is sure he was never guilty of such a thing. To use one’s experience as a member of the majority to negate or to ridicule the experience of a member of the minority seems to me a perfect example of discrimination, all by itself. "</p>
<p>So I am incapable of seeing or understanding discrimination in my environment around me due to me virtue of me being a male? I am sorry but who is being discriminatory here? This coming from the poster who talks about the “disadvantage of having to deal with adolescent male egos”.</p>
<p>I am not negating or ridiculing anyone else I am simply taking issue to sweeping generalizations about “80% of males in STEM fields” being idiot, bigoted blowhards.</p>
<p>I have seen more discriminatory attitudes in this thread (admittedly from only a very few posters) then anywhere on campus. It makes me sad that there are adults here on the parent’s forum that hold such stereotypical sexist beliefs (and I have seen it cut both ways with some misogynistic comments from adults in other threads). I sincerely hope that the people that hold these prejudiced beliefs are the minority in the working world, otherwise I may just stick to academia where people are judged by the quality of their work.</p>
<p>He wasn’t looking for English/humanities majors. He was looking for engineers who could perform engineering work AND communicate. He said the women are consistently better at it, and they are itching to find them.</p>
<p>Namelessstatistic, you are missing the point. You assume that being male in a majority female class is the same experience as being female in a majority male class. It is not. Listen up to the discussion on this thread – you can’t even fathom that there is a difference, but the difference is very large. And again – this isn’t a question of “quality and style of education”. All you seem to be thinking about is how the material is communicated to you. Interpersonal interaction is VERY important to most women – men can often take it or leave it. So what seems unimportant in the classroom dynamic to you is criticial to women.</p>
<p>And…my experience wasn’t tarnished by the bad, bad boys at her camp. I actually felt sorry for them – they didn’t seem to know that they hadn’t actually accomplished anything. Although I am guessing they put on their college applications that they did – and guessing the colleges did not bother to check the truthfulness of their claims.</p>
<p>Also, regarding the lab equipment – my D has the experience on her robotics team of the boys grabbing a tool she was USING A THE TIME out of her hand because they wanted to do something with it. Their task was no more important to the functioning of the robot than the task she was doing – but somehow they thought they could just take it. And they were always trying to get her to write the newsletter, call sponsors, etc. – instead of working out the mathematical calculations for the design, work on the CAD design (and she was one of only two students who took the training in the CAD software), or physically work on the build. She was assigned to the design and build teams, and a lot of the boys would STILL tell her to go work on those things. I was a project management mentor for her team this year, and she was not exaggerating – that is really how a lot of the boys acted.</p>
<p>I think I have lot more “real life” experience than you do with teams of men – and the stereotypes are based in reality. I get paid a whale of a lot of money to move those teams from their typical disfunctional state to a more efficient team approach. So I know exactly how ego, bluster, and overestimation impact their work. I am always pleased when I meet those men who don’t have those issues. But that is a limited pool.</p>
<p>1) In the MIT Tech they did an article asking the girls whether they felt the environment was hostile to girls. No one said that it was. One girl actually responded that MIT was more welcoming to girls than guys. </p>
<p>2) I’ve been in STEM for almost 20 years, and it’s been pretty close to a 50-50 gender ratio everywhere I’ve gone. So I don’t think my observations can be dismissed that easily because I am a member of a “majority”. To say that male observations on this issue are an example of discrimination is both absurd and outrageous.</p>
<p>3) I have plenty of anecdotes of girls bullying or belittling guys, or being aggressive in general in the STEM arena. It’s not that I haven’t seen anything. Whether this qualifies as discrimination is debatable, but most of intparent’s anecdotes aren’t about outright discrimination; rather, they concern a an intrinsic obnoxiousness of males being at fault rather than overt discrimination.</p>
<p>Women are not being discriminated against in STEM, there are not more women in Mathematics and Physics and some engineering disciplines because of the dearth of critical mass of women clustered at the higher end of the distribution of people who can do advance mathematics. This does not mean that women at the higher end of the distribution can’t do the work, the number is too small to make a difference.</p>
<p>But most women don’t want to work in an environment where “intrinsic obnoxiousness” is accepted and even expected. Duh…</p>
<p>Plus – you are mistaking good grades in English/humanities with the skills it takes to get a team to communicate internally and externally. Those are not necessarily the same skills. The ability to get a group to a common way of looking at things and have the common view expressed aloud or in writing, being willing to ask questions when something isn’t clear (this is kinda like asking directions… and that stereotype has legs because there is truth to that as well!), document the decisions and results so everyone knows about them inside and outside of the team, notice and bring up inconsistencies in the details of how the project is being carried out, calling people on their BS when they are blowing smoke – those are the skills I see as often stronger in women. And also key to higher quality project outcomes in the IT world.</p>
<p>Pariswit, that is BS. My D had a 2380 SAT and 800 Math II SAT. Yet she has thought twice about a STEM career and rejected engineering outright because of a<strong>h</strong>* behaviour of the young men she has encountered in the field. There are a lot of male STEM majors who actually do not score that high on the math side – but still go on to STEM careers. It isn’t like every guy in STEM was a hotshot on his Math SATs – they weren’t.</p>
<p>First of all, I contested that “intrinsic obnoxiousness” as a valid stereotype.</p>
<p>I made that distinction between overt discrimination and intrinsic obnoxiousness because marysidney’s argument was that members of a majority cannot see their own discrimination. So I was qualifying my statements by saying that the anecdotes I have seen were mostly but not all just examples of obnoxious people rather than discrimination, but that your (intparent) examples were also mostly not examples of discrimination.</p>
<p>@intparent
“Namelessstatistic, you are missing the point. You assume that being male in a majority female class is the same experience as being female in a majority male class. It is not. Listen up to the discussion on this thread – you can’t even fathom that there is a difference, but the difference is very large. And again – this isn’t a question of “quality and style of education”. All you seem to be thinking about is how the material is communicated to you. Interpersonal interaction is VERY important to most women – men can often take it or leave it. So what seems unimportant in the classroom dynamic to you is criticial to women.”</p>
<p>So women can understand what it is like for a man to be in a class primarily composed of other women (based on your comment that “the difference is very large”) but a man cannot “fathom” what a woman feels like to be in a class primarily composed of men?
Can you please tell me why women like yourself have this special ability to step into another person’s shoes while no men is capable of doing the same?</p>
<p>Also how do you know males don’t need interpersonal interaction in class (yet another extension of the “men can’t communicate” streiotype so prevalent in current romantic comedies)? I call BS on this. If we didn’t we would all just be doing online degrees. In graduate school you work in teams. Any successful team needs strong interpersonal communication whether it is primarily composed of males or females. </p>
<p>“I think I have lot more “real life” experience than you do with teams of men – and the stereotypes are based in reality.”</p>
<p>I AM a man. I have been one for 22 years!!! I have worked with groups of other boys and men since I was a child and I can tell you that the stereotypes you claim are true are by in large wrong. They are just as wrong as stereotypes such as “women are to emotional for the hard sciences” or “girls can’t do math” and all these stereotypes are rooted in ignorance and bigotry.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the explanation offered by pariswit (#290) is actually right. At the moment, there may be fewer women than men at the “higher end of the distribution of people who can do advanced mathematics.” However, I think that the fraction of female professors at top universities falls below the fraction of women among those who can do advanced mathematics.</p>
<p>Along the way in my education and professional life, I have encountered a number of women with exceptional talent in science and/or math. It is my impression that the fraction of them who continued to a faculty career is lower than the fraction of similarly talented men who continued.</p>
<p>As a side note: This is not to say that women who are talented in STEM fields must go into them. I have known mathematically talented women who made decisions based on probable income associated with various career choices, and they more or less inevitably opted out of STEM fields. Perhaps more significant personally, I have also know people who struggled with the significance of the work that they were doing in a STEM field, vs. other work that they might be doing instead. (In this thread, I have not claimed high importance for STEM work–quite the opposite, actually.) </p>
<p>It is sometimes difficult to identify all of the reasons for choices that women make, not to continue in mathematics. Sometimes the cultural forces that lead to decisions are difficult to see until years have passed.</p>
<p>To give an example of a different type: I entered school a few years after Sputnik was launched. In US schools at that time, there was an exceptionally high level of encouragement for scientific career choices. I did not recognize all of the forces that contributed to my choice of a scientific career until they had become essentially “historical.” Actually, I am grateful for those forces–my education was stronger because of it, and the career happened to be a good choice for me. Still, I think it is very hard to assess a culture in which one is immersed.</p>
<p>High School maths does not require special ability, you have to understand the concepts and do your homework. Of course, there are some rigorous maths curriculums at some high schools that require more, but these schools are in the minority. </p>
<p>I am talking about undergrad and PhD programs. The more advanced classes you take, the fewer the number of women you would see in those classes. </p>
<p>I am not sure about what statistics you are looking at, but just looking at the distribution of the SAT1 (maths) and SAT11(2) scores, there are more men clustered at the top than women. Just take a loot at Putnam and other competitive maths competitions, there are more men than women.</p>
<p>I am not talking about ability; I am talking about numbers…</p>
<p>Interesting post. I agree with you that there really is a litany of complex social influences that shape your career and I would say with the spread of mass media and with the level of connection that exists today, these forces are probably the strongest that the ever were!</p>