In this thread about males under the age of 35, there were a number of valid comments regarding the gaps and challenges that women continue to face in the 21st century. In order to give each topic space to discuss problems and potential solutions, a separate thread to discuss the situation of women has been created.
I am not a mod, but I would prefer that there be no “what about” comments about the other gender. Individuals can mention the other gender as in, this is also an issue here, or this was an issue for this other group and this is how it was improved. But minimizing the negative impacts of what’s happened (and continues to occur) toward women should be avoided. We can be supportive about more than one group at a time; this is not a zero sum game.
Opening this up to others, but have no fear, I will be back.
This image comes from the Department of Labor here.
Only about a third of women with less than a high school diploma are in the workforce, and less than half of women with only a high school diploma and only a little over half of those with some college. I suspect that a big contributing cause are the wages that women with these levels of education can obtain. If these women end up having any children, the family will almost certainly be better off financially if the woman stays home to take care of the children rather than continuing to work and pay for childcare. This, of course, can impact her Social Security eligibility, retirement, dependence on a spouse, etc.
In terms of careers in construction work, women have been extremely underrepresented, though the numbers are shifting in a positive direction (source).
This article references a number of different trade professions that frequently don’t get thought of when we think of “the trades.” (Go about halfway down to see the different trades; the earlier section deals with a number of the causes for the disparities seen.)
This Forbes article mentions various options including dental hygienist, hair stylist, and others (some of which I had no clue paid as well as they do). They include some traditional trades (like electrician), but I think it was interesting what was included and what was not.
I haven’t spent much time on that other thread, but the one thing that comes to mind for both women and men is the ability to make choices without being shamed. If your parents spent a lot of money on your education but you decide that you want to stay home with the kids, you shouldn’t be shamed for that. Same with men.
One other thing top of mind because of the new attention on women’s college basketball is that women can be competitive and mix it up on the court and still admire their opponent. It’s not a cat fight. Give women the opportunity to be all the things, including competitive as hell.
I definitely was surprised at what Forbes considers “trades” and the associated salaries.
I only know one young woman who has gone into a traditional trade - welding, but my D is reporting that there are more women working on the floor in manufacturing than even a few years ago.
D recently attended a conference for women in her industry (although it was open to men and some attended). She was disappointed that it was held in a state which is not supportive of women’s rights. She was also disappointed in one of the main speakers (female) who continued to perpetuate stereotypes of women being non supportive of other women in general.
I see a huge issue with the lack of women in tech. My daughter is in this age group. I would consider her job a tech job - data analytics. Her experience has been that most higher level women in tech were struggling themselves and therefore not supportive of their female coworkers and women who reported to them. She has had a number of bosses over her career and the women were less supportive than the men (anecdotal) She does try to be very supportive of the women that work for her.
There is still a lot of catching up to do to get more women in tech. This is from a recent article -Women in tech statistics: The hard truths of an uphill battle | CIO
" Despite national conversations about the lack of diversity in tech, women are disproportionally missing out on the ongoing boom in IT jobs. While women make up 47% of all employed adults in the US, as of 2022, they hold only 28% of computing and mathematical roles, according to data from Zippia, with women identifying as Asian or Pacific Islander making up just 7% of the IT workforce and Black and Hispanic women accounting for 3% and 2%, respectively.
In fact, the ratio of women to men in tech roles has declined in the past 35 years, with half of women who go into tech dropping out by the age of 35, according to data from Accenture. The study attributes much of this decline to a lack of inclusivity for women in the industry."
I was in tech back in the dark ages (80s) and had lots of female bosses and co-workers and we did not feel at all like we were at a disadvantage.
I wonder if that is tracking fewer women in college engineering majors? I would have thought that since there are more women enrolled in college (than men) that more would be attracted to higher paying engineering fields as opposed to lower paying degrees.
From dinner conversations, it is clearly evident that the experiences of my D (sophomore, BME, Johns Hopkins) are worlds apart from the experiences of my wife (BSEE, MSEE, MBA).
Purdue is still 73% male in the CoE. I posted this in the other thread but my D definitely heard the message from educators that girls don’t “like” math and physics. She actually had a peer tell her that he should always light the Bunsen burner in lab because it was “too dangerous for a girl”. She’s only 23 years old so this isn’t back in the stone ages. Thankfully she had plenty of good role models in her life and we encouraged her to shoot for the stars.
Her company is working hard to shore up their female engineers and managers with a focus on retention. They have a program specifically to support women in building leadership skills, accelerating their careers, mentoring, and have resources for child care (which still seems to be one of the biggest reasons women are leaving the workplace).
As wonderful as her company is, she’s often still the only woman in the room.
I will add that my daughter’s college experience was that advanced math class were almost 90% male and she only had one female math professor (2012-2016).
My daughters (data science and software engineering) have so many stories to tell and really hate the male-dominated bro culture that is so prevalent in those fields. They both chose their most recent jobs because there would at least be one other woman on their team. Unfortunately that didn’t last in one case and the woman is incompetent in the other.
One amusing (to me) and sad reality has been how much emotional work they are expected to do for the team. They both spend way too much time doing conflict mediation and communication clarification for their coworkers. I find it amusing only because these are my super introverted, socially anxious daughters. They both just want to be individual contributers on well functioning teams! Their big sister is the socially astute one! But in the tech field their modest social skills stand out!
Probably because the majority of students in the advanced math class are male???
Interestingly , some of our son’s favorite CS professors at Stanford were women. In his freshman year he joined a lab lead by a renowned woman in the AI field. He remain in her lab his entire time at Stanford.
Maybe a regional thing, but my daughters encountered that stuff in high school in midwest, mid-Atlantic, and west coast schools (mostly suburban settings, and yes we moved a lot). This would have been in the aughts and early teens. There were also programs and teachers who were very encouraging, but peers, not so much.
My middle daughter was frequently the only white girl in higher math and science courses in a school that was 25% white girls.
Note that % female in CS was under 10% in 1970, peaked at over 35% in the 1980s, but fell to under 30% in 1990, and then fell to around 20% in the early 2000s (around the dotcom crash), staying at around that level since then.
On the other hand, engineering jumped from something like 2% in 1970 to over 10% in the 1980s, with a much slower upward trend to now a little over 20%.
Health professions, education, English, foreign languages, and arts have been mostly female since 1970, while psychology and later biology eventually became mostly female during the time period since 1970.
The decline of women as a share of computer science majors is really startling. It and mathematics/statistics are the only ones where there was a decline of more than a few percentage points. I don’t see how it can be interest in the field when women made up 35% of the degrees around 1985. Why would interest go down? Have the efforts to increase interest backfired? Have the males in those fields engaged in gatekeeping in some way?
It’s really kind of weird compared to engineering which has a low % but steady increase.
Some contributing factors IMO (I work in the industry, have a daughter interested in CS, and am an executive sponsor of my firm’s Women In Technology resource group):
lack of exposure during formative years
lack of support from teachers and college counselors
widespread biases (often unconscious), both in the workplace and in society at large
social perception (computer/engineering stuff is considered nerdy and not cool, especially for girls)
I don’t know that it’s tin foil hat time. Could be as simple as the guys who go into computer science don’t want girls around and exclude them from informal things like study groups and eventually women just get tired of being left out and having to push for a place at the table. I’m not saying that’s what happened. Just a possibility. Something happened around 1985 and again in the early 2000s. Maybe the decline around the dot com bust is because women aren’t as big of risk takers. I don’t know. But it is a startling decline.
That has not been my daughter’s experience or those of her friends (and they went to a STEM magnet high school before college). There are several challenges as I listed, but I don’t believe men trying to actively shut out women is one of them.
