<p>QM- with all due respect, how would you know that other jobs are easier? Have you done my kind of work?</p>
<p>Of course not, oldfort. The fact is that doing ANYTHING at a level of true excellence is supremely difficult.</p>
<p>Exactly. It doesn’t matter whether its STEM or any other kind of work, to do it well requires time and dedication.</p>
<p>I agree with Consolation’s post #120. Perhaps the similarity with STEM research is that a writer is trying to accomplish something that he/she does not quite know how to do?</p>
<p>Do you know how to do the things that you need to do as components of your job, oldfort? If so, I think your job is easier in that particular regard than STEM research (or writing).</p>
<p>Perhaps to relate this back to Pizzagirl’s remark: Since I know that Pizzagirl was a math major, perhaps she took courses that had very difficult problems in them. If a student encounters a very challenging problem, and has the personality that prevents just letting it go, the problem tends to consume the student–causing preoccupation to the point of sleeplessness. Now imagine that your existence is like that 90% of the time. No one is “assigning” any problems that you find easy.</p>
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Eh…I don’t know about that.</p>
<p>QM,I see no point to quibbling over what is harder.Many jobs have the potential to cause stress or sleepless nights.</p>
<p>I would add artists and composers to my earlier list–or anyone, to the extent that the person is trying to do something of a type that has not been done before.</p>
<p>There are many types of stressful jobs, or jobs that cause sleepless nights, I agree. One might have a demanding or unpleasant boss, or difficult co-workers. One might have a boss who is clearly indicating that one should cut ethical corners, without saying as much explicitly–that is a hard problem to which the only solution might be resigning. One might be worried about how to make payroll–that is a really rough problem, because other people’s lives depend upon the solution. Obviously, decisions in the medical field can have drastic effects on people’s lives, and those decisions come with difficulties of their own. STEM researchers are freed from a lot of these problems (though not the one about providing salaries for group members), and I realize that that is a true blessing.</p>
<p>QM- you have no idea the level of stress my job is, and how fast I need to react to various crisis. Since you don’t know, you have no way of judging.</p>
<p>Jobs can be difficult for many reasons–stress and the need for quick response are among them. I think the problem is that we are using the word “difficult” to cover different types of difficulty. In my opinion, a job is as difficult/hard/(any other semi-synonym) as STEM research if the person holding it is trying to figure out what to do for a high fraction of the time (and is fully competent–just trying to do something unlike anything that has been done before).</p>
<p>Personally I think farm workers - harvesting in hot fields or in a factory butchering animals - have the hardest job. Sitting at a desk attempting to solve a difficult math problem sounds positively cushy and easy compared to that.</p>
<p>Yes, physically most STEM research is pretty easy–some of the experimental fields are not as easy, but still not physically demanding compared to true labor. Boredom is not a problem, either. Nor does one need to be especially politically adept (case in point), although it does help if one is. In the short time frame, no one’s life hinges on decisions made by STEM researchers, unlike the case in medicine, civil engineering, aeronautical engineering, . . . although in the longer time frame, the solution of any problem may contribute to improving living conditions. So there are a lot of difficulties that a STEM researcher does not have to contend with. I think the problem is the umbrella term of “hard,” which covers so much.</p>
<p>You all are getting pretty far off topic, here, unless you want to argue that the reason that women don’t go into STEM is because they are culturally influenced to think that the subject matter is too difficult for them. This may be the case, in fact. My experience does not lead me to think that willingness and ability to entertain intellectual effort is gender-associated. What I have seen is that people are affected by cultural expectations concerning their performance: there have been studies that have shown that teachers, of both sexes, tend to respond more positively to boys’ answers than to girls’, as well as to call on boys more frequently than on girls. It is also true that, in my experience, girls and women are more likely to take criticism more personally than boys are; it may well be that that is another culturally conditioned response, so that boys are encouraged to bounce back, while girls are encouraged to examine their performance in a more critical, and self-reflective, way. </p>
<p>(Up thread there was a remark to the effect that students going into physics and math were discouraged from those majors because of a belief current in academia that those majors were only valuable to academia, and there’s no future in that. That’s half-true; I think the CW is that getting a <em>PhD</em> in either subject is not particularly helpful if one is not planning an academic career. This is true, of course, of many another PhD subject, including English and History. Most people who hold doctoral degrees in those subjects would discourage students, not from majoring in them, but from going on to graduate school for them, because of the abysmal prospects of earning a living from them. The liberal arts model of undergraduate learning, however, assumes that the value of an undergraduate degree is not so much a technical preparation for a career as a foundation of learning and writing skills that should underlie most careers.)</p>
<p>I got my master’s degree in engineering in 1986. I expected to see more female structural engineers as I got older, but I haven’t. I’m usually one of about two women at our professional meetings.</p>
<p>Whenever I DO meet a woman engineer, I ask if her dad was an engineer. Exactly ONE TIME has a young woman said, “No.” That astounds me.</p>
<p>Mainly I was reacting to Pizzagirl’s comment in #111:
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<p>I think the elements that make these jobs “difficult” are different. One word doesn’t cover it.</p>
<p>With regard to marysidney’s point: I think that some women do conclude that the requirements for great success in a STEM research position in academia are incompatible with motherhood (in the absence of other sources of wealth). For example, the most successful scientists I know travel frequently to speak at international conferences, with the result that they are away from home a number of days (e.g. 60-80 per year) that makes it difficult to be a responsible mother, unless one has a stay-at-home father, or young children who do not have to be in school + a nanny so that they can travel along, or some other arrangement. A recent brief report in Science indicated that women in the biological sciences were more likely to turn down speaking invitations than men. My post-doc mentor advised me never to turn down an invitation to speak. There were a few instances where it was impossible to accept.</p>
<p>On the main topic of the thread, there was an interesting article in Monthly Notices of the American Mathematical Society (roughly in 2010), comparing the participation of women in the International Mathematical Olympiad (shouts of "Noooooo . … ") from different countries. I thought that one of the most interesting aspects of this was the comparison between East and West Germany before reunification, the comparison of the Czech Republic and Slovakia post split, and other comparisons of countries that one might superficially expect to be similar. The levels of participation were quite different. Participation by young American women is rising (albeit very slowly). To a large extent, I think that the differences in participation by women in different countries are influenced by culture.</p>
<p>I think that the internal culture of some STEM fields is actually not particularly comfortable for women. There are a lot of programs to draw more women into STEM fields, and there is a fairly strong emphasis on encouraging women to consider STEM fields, but once a woman has chosen a STEM field, she still has to find a modus vivendi within it. I had thought that this problem would be solved by now.</p>
<p>My niece is an engineer with a major corporation. (To speak to MaineLonghorn’s point, her father is a lawyer, but one of her grandfathers was an engineer, so she’s not far off from his main group.) She has commented on multiple occasions that there are still a lot of difficulties for her, due to being a woman. She took welding in high school along with academic subjects and worked in an engineering research lab through much of college–the issues connected with treatment of women did not come up until she began working.</p>
<p>Regarding STEM research being the most difficult job… Different people find different fields more challenging than others, giving little meaning to claims of the relative difficulty of STEM. My STEM day job often involves determining original solutions to engineering/software goals/problems and supporting the implementations of those solutions. I also started a successful Internet company that relates to determining strategies and optimal solutions in a different STEM field (mostly relates to applied math and programming). The majority of the population would probably find either of these difficult, but I do not since the end goals stem from logical analysis in a predictable a way, with heavy emphasis on formulaic methods. However, I’d find many non-STEM jobs far more difficult because end goals could not be achieved with logical analysis in a predictable way. Examples include things like writing a quality story, creating a successful advertising campaign, or figuring out how to resolve a dispute while keeping all parties reasonably satisfied. I wouldn’t know where to begin and would probably do quite poorly. We all have different strengths.</p>
<p>Of course, there are occasional people like Richard Feynman, who even find it easy as well as fun to make discoveries that lack precedents (with the possible exception of his first year as a faculty member at Cornell). On the other hand, one of the biographies of Feynman has the title “No Ordinary Genius.”</p>
<p>Well, Maine you about to meet another structural engineer who’s dad isn’t an engineer. ;)</p>
<p>The difficulties faced by females in engineering start early. I know I’ve had to prove my smarts with a group of guys while working on projects in high school.</p>