<p>I am a woman, I have a fairly senior job, married, raised 2 kids. What am I missing? I think I am still breathing here.</p>
<p>Niquii77 - do you have a job? Or is this all hearsay?</p>
<p>@kelsmom Insulting women? I’m not arguing. You are the one who commented on me. Quote me one when I said all women don’t go into senior levels positions or something of that nature where I encompassed the entire women population.</p>
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That is you, oldfort. If my above statement does not apply to you then you are not the woman who I am talking about.</p>
<p>I am a woman, so why would you preclude me from your statement? My women friends are CFO of a major global bank, senior manager at Bloomberg, business owner, house wife, head of marketing, teacher, general counselor, partner of a consulting firm…I also know a lot of men who stay home and are main caretakers of children. My older daughter works at IB. She was ranked #1 analyst (men and women included) within her department last year. She plans on getting married and having children some day. Would you also not apply your statement to her? Our younger daughter also plans on having a very demanding career someday. Maybe she is also an outlier.</p>
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STEM is often grouped together, but the male/female ratio varies tremendously among different STEM fields. In many fields of engineering and CS only ~10% of degrees are awarded to women (CS, computer, electrical, mechanical, …). For example, for the 2009-10 year the gender ratios for CS degrees at Stanford were:</p>
<p>BS: 8% female, 92% male
MS: 11% female, 89% male
PhD: 4% female, 96% male</p>
<p>This fits with my personal experiences. Some specific classes in both EE and CS had worse ratios with ~0 women in the entire class. Female faculty were similarly rare in these fields, and many tech companies have similar ratios among engineers. However, women are well represented in fields related to biology, including both biomedical engineering and medicine (I realize medicine is sometimes not considered a STEM field). </p>
<p>I’d expect there is both a cultural and evolutionary component to this distorted ratio.</p>
<p>What Data10 said. CS at Purdue has a lower percentage of female students than Mechanical Engineering had in my beloved Central Elbonia College of Mines and Engineering 30 years ago in backwards Europe… I don’t buy the role models in K-12 as my kids had mostly women science and math teachers even in high school… </p>
<p>But it’s not any better in Europe, either. We have many more female engineers in our India subsidiary than we do in Europe or US…</p>
<p>Half the students in my son’s CS classes at Brown are female. One limiting factor at many other schools may be that one has to be enrolled in the college of engineering to get priority access to CS classes – and that requires a strong commitment to the field while still in high school, when applying to college. Those that wish to sample a few classes before making a commitment, whether male or female, would be at a severe disadvantage.</p>
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<p>I think there are not that many obvious female role models in STEM. Marie Curie Sklodowska and Rosalind Franklin are the main ones I hear about and sometimes, they seem like ‘tokens’ - especially the former. How many kids can name 5 major female scientists or entrepreneurs of this era? (not from a nearby institution). For guys, it’s way easier. If we celebrated the accomplishments of talented women more, I feel like it would perhaps change the ‘CS/physics/math are guy’ fields perception. I don’t have a study on this, but I’ve found this to be a common perception by speaking to kids from different schools. </p>
<p>For me, personally - I want to be a clinician scientist, which means an MD with a research degree (or at least a postdoc) who does both basic science research and sees patients. At my local institution, there are doctors who do this path; however, they are all male. Will it stop me from pursuing my dream? No, because it’s something I’m fortunate enough to be familiar with and now I know there are up and coming female clinician scientists. However, I feel like that could be discouraging for other students who don’t really have the advantages I do. </p>
<p>I don’t want to get into the maternal impulse thing because I don’t really have experience with it.</p>
<p>Edit: The guys I mention at my institution are really nice and inspiring for me. They are amazing people. But it did make me question whether it’s really possible for me to have a family and still be successful in this field.</p>
<p>From what I’ve observed as a quasi engineering/CS techie insider from some members of extended family family, pop culture, and from working in the IS/IT field with many engineers/CS techies as colleagues, factors include:</p>
<p>negative pop culture stereotypes of engineers/computer techies which turn off a lot of folks…including women, a culture of one-upsmanship(a.k.a. I’m more nerdier/have more tech cred than you!)<em>, some disdain for social skills/niceties among the hardcore engineers/computer techies who considered them “a waste of time” or “a means to assuage those who are “intellectually deficient””</em>, some latent sexism among some engineers/computer techies that “women can’t cut it” in their field*, etc. </p>
<p>The one upsmanship part had various dimensions such as those who felt folks who used GUI operating systems like various iterations of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS before OSX were “Tech idiot pointy-haired bosses/corporate office drones”* or “tech illiterate hippie creatives” respectively*. Lost count of how many times I’ve heard that from hardcore engineering/CS major HS classmates, some of their college classmates at schools like MIT, and older colleagues who all worshiped at the alter of the UNIX System V/BSD command line from my HS years onward. There were also contingents who worshiped at the alter of Sun OS/Solaris command-line. </p>
<p>This attitude was also quite common on the early linux forums during the late '90s/early '00s and was a factor in why Linux had a negative rep among some newbies who wanted to try it, but were being yelled at for the “crime” of legitimately asking for help after exhausting their own research/personal knowledge resources. Thankfully, this is no longer the case and many linux forums…including some for more technically demanding distros are much more friendly and helpful than they were 12+ years ago. </p>
<ul>
<li>In short, all manifestations of nerd/techie machismo for the hardcore engineering/CS set.</li>
</ul>
<p>OK this is an opinion from a female physician. When I went into medicine in the early 80’s, it was a STEM field. Marie Curie was my idol. I recently visited the street where she lived in France in her later years. Now medicine is 50 % women and perhaps a soft science. I have to tell you where I practice- there is NO female administrators, executives, chiefs of anything.The women have better credentials than the men. Now you might ask why women are not getting promoted. Well, is it that women have babies and do not try to get an administrative role? NO. Are there not qualified female candidates? NO. The very qualified women try but are pushed out of the selection process in very subtle ways ( not given committee assignments, acting chief or chief sections, or even allowed to speak with someone asking their opinion, etc) if not obvious ones. PEOPLE PROMOTE THEMSELVES- THEY CHOOSE PEOPLE THAT LOOK LIKE THEM. Unless they try very hard to promote diversity or are required to, it continues. I am saddened by this pattern.</p>
<p>The non-life sciences STEM fields are dominated by men. In my engineering firm, I observe lots of young women hired. But in my company’s U.S. & European offices, I see many professional women cut back to part-time after the baby comes-- career kiss of death. </p>
<p>By contrast, in the Asia offices, where domestic help is cheap and plentiful, my female colleagues squeeze out that baby and are back to full-time in weeks. The professional women there are not hung up on being viewed as a bad mother if they are not present 27/7 to personally wipe junior’s butt.</p>
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Your son’s class is the exception, not the rule. [This</a> article](<a href=“http://www.browndailyherald.com/2011/02/16/algorithms-cant-solve-cs-gender-gap/]This”>Algorithms can't solve CS gender gap - The Brown Daily Herald) in the Brown Daily Herald mentions only ~15% of Brown students in CS concentrations are women. 15% is better than the overall average in the US, but still far from a proportional balance.</p>
<p>It’s not just a matter of women having limited access to engineering classes because they need to apply to the engineering school. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Restricting access based on college applications can improve the gender balance since some colleges treat women in engineering as an underrepresented group.</p>
<p>There are a million studies documenting difficulties when a group is a minority of a pool of applicants, students, or employees. In the 70’s a lot of work was done proving that girls in all girl classes did as well as boys in math, and for a while, there was a push to make sure that girls were either in single sex classes or in sufficient numbers as to make being a math girl not an exception. </p>
<p>Once girls’s test scores were more comparable to boys, this trend disappeared. I have watched my elder daughter be one or two getting extra math enrichment or placed in the BC Calc track. Any sensitivity to the difficulty of being one of the few has been lost to the culture. Even the teachers seem unaware of the difficulty inherent in there only being only 10 or 20% girls in a class.</p>
<p>Now lots of anecdotes don’t make the truth, but the research is out there. As long as men are so numerous in, say, engineering, it will be hard for girls and young women to imagine themselves as engineers, to be welcome as one of the group, and to rise through the ranks. They will, in effect, be engineerettes (like the one Smurfette among the hundreds of others)</p>
<p>Girl Scouts of America does not consider “physician”, nor any health care related career, to be a STEM career. It is apparently not “hard” science.</p>
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Historically teaching was dominated by women because it was one of the few things they were allowed to do. I found it interesting that you see more men with the older kids.</p>
<p>I think it’s possible that men and women’s brains are different enough that they naturally gravitate to different fields, but also possible that most of the difference is purely cultural. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time as my kids played competitive chess. Every kid in our school had chess lessons in second grade, but we still only had a handful of girls attend tournaments regularly. The only local school that had a lot of girls was one where the chess program was run by a woman.</p>
<p>I’m in a field (architecture) that had hardly any women 50 years ago,when I was in school (early 80s) my class was 50/50, but there were many other architecture schools that had many fewer women. Many people assumed I was the secretary if I answered the phone in my first job. (That never happens any more BTW.) Now I believe most schools are 50/50 and architecture is perceived as a job that can be done by anyone.</p>
<p>I think the goal is to be sure that our girls aren’t pursuing fields because they feel that they would be uncomfortable being part of a minority in the working world.</p>
<p>I agree, Mathmom. My mother graduated from HS in 1949 and would have loved to be a CPA, but she told me that in those days, you were a teacher, a nurse or a secretary and she chose secretary, passing up a college scholarship. She also did bookkeeping, which she really loved and did on a volunteer basis at our parish for years. As for me and my opinions on STEM … well, that’s one way you can tell I’m adopted!</p>
<p>I’ve worked in the software industry for 20 years, and my experience has been pretty much what cobrat (#28) and rockymtnhigh (#29) described.</p>
<p>The culture is competitive and back-biting, and helping other people (especially females) learn the ropes is not rewarded. But, in my opinion, the biggest problem is that men in the field tend not to ‘hear’ women or recognize their contributions. </p>
<p>A woman can say something in a meeting and her words are resoundingly ignored; a man can say the same thing five minutes later and everyone runs with the idea. A woman does a good job on a project and her (male) teammate or her (male) manager gets the credit. </p>
<p>I’ve seen this time and time again, and when I’ve tried to point it out, the men just don’t believe it. It’s almost as though they have blinders on.</p>
<p>I think that a lot of (maybe most) professions operated like that in the past, but computer science seems to be taking the longest to accept women as colleagues. Maybe the delay has something to do with the nerd machismo that cobrat mentioned. Or maybe the men in the field never got to know a wide variety of females when they were young, and assume all women are just versions of their (non-technical) mothers.</p>
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In what ways would you propose to achieve this goal?</p>
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<p>I worked in the software industry throughout the 80s and early-mid 90s, and I have to say that I observed the same thing.</p>
<p>There aren’t many female composers either, and many top conservatories don’t have a single female on the composition faculty. What do you think the cultural factors might be with that?</p>
<p>In general, females still have more difficulty promoting themselves, and if they do, they may be seen as difficult or aggressive when a guy doing the same thing seems perfectly normal.</p>
<p>Both my daughters are already talking about how to mix children and career. I am happy for those who have “done it all” but let’s be honest and realistic about how difficult it can be, especially for families without daycare resources that are affordable.</p>
<p>And I do have to respond to one poster, that staying home with babies/children involves a lot more than wiping butts. It is a legitimate choice to stay home, whether male or female, and rising to the corporate heights or STEM fulfillment isn’t everyone’s goal in life.</p>
<p>I always assumed the reason was because women in general (I know there are exceptions) enjoy a life that revolves around <em>human</em> (or animal) issues, as opposed to mechanical/factual issues. This is why women now dominate careers in medicine, but not so much in CS/math/physics etc. One of my Ds was a stellar math and science student in high school, but had absolutely no personal desire to pursue those fields, so it was not for lack of ability.</p>