also, women are definitely still underrepresented in surgical settings, despite having better outcomes, to the point where equipment is literally not sized for them (Oversized and overlooked: Women surgeons struggle to find equipment that fits | AAMC). i still remember my mom making a joke while in line for the bathroom at a theater about “we never have this problem (of long lines to the women’s bathroom) at the orthopedic conferences.” as of 2021, 5.9% of orthopedic surgeons were women
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Engineering and CS curriculums are HARD, often with stringent curriculum / lack of electives. As mentioned in the other thread, I feel like females with really high math scores also have really high verbal scores…. easier for them to get into easier paths toward law school or med school.
Could just be what they are interested in. My oldest son could have easily gone into CS. He was not interested in that type of work though. He’d prefer and did pursue engineering. I imagine many young adults look at what the day to day activities of a career will end up being and that sways them one way or another, as it should.
There are few women engineers in my local workplace. I will say I am impressed with the ones that are there as they seem to be well qualified and great workers. Perhaps it’s just not seen by as many women as an interesting career? I would say that most engineers fit a personality “type”. Maybe more women just don’t see themselves doing the work? I could certainly see that changing. I think exposing more students to industries by visiting workplaces and taking tours, etc, could be useful.
I talked to my D and she said that engineering felt more social to her than CS. She said her CS work felt like she was grinding away alone, whereas engineering was so project based and collaborative. Plus she pointed out that you can still do a lot of CS in engineering but not necessarily the other way around.
I don’t want to extrapolate from one 23 year old’s perspective but this resonated with me.
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I have a couple of woman friends from med school who became orthopedic surgeons, and they are outstanding doctors. Both specialized in Hand ortho, which seems common for women orthopedic surgeons. Part of the reason is the smaller tools, the other is because by banding together in Hand they have been able to have female colleagues and create a subculture that is more welcoming and less “bro.”
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And pre-med with organic chem is also HARD and women are not stepping away from those majors.
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So maybe it’s not actually a “problem” after all?
There are plenty of studies showing that diversity in the workplace is necessary to drive innovation. And conversely, how lack of diversity (not just gender) can lead to some epic fails. (I’m thinking recently about automatic hand sanitizers that don’t recognize dark skin or the AI facial recognition fails).
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Of course pre-med is hard, especially (from what I’ve heard) organic chem. But from what I understand, beyond the core med school requirements there is some flexibility on major /
My point is that usually the course sequence is quite technical and rigid in Engineering** That works well for students wanting to minimize humanities classes…. in my experience those students are usually male (but admittedly that may be skewed by the fact that most of my peers were male).
*Example course map Mechanical Engineering Curriculum Map Fall 2022 and Beyond | The Grainger College of Engineering | UIUC
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I’m a woman in my 50s, and it’s been just in the last few years that I have come to understand that I am both good at math and interested in math. You might think I would have understood the evidence earlier, but I did not.
Part of my problem was the stereotype that math was the realm of “boy geniuses” who were born that way. Another part was the lack of educational support at home. Learning about “FGLI” and the very predictable issues this involves came with such a shock of recognition! My parents did not go beyond Algebra 1. My mother has significant math anxiety. My father does not (I think he probably is very intelligent, but poorly educated, he missed a lot of school growing up to work in the family business.) Reading here on CC the amount of math support some kids get at home has been eye opening. I learned about the existence of AoPS from one of @Chekov 's posts. I think I might have enjoyed that.
Anyway, academic achievement was not a value in my household. I was “homeschooled” during a couple of years of grade school, and during that time received no instruction. I returned to school having to catch up (had missed multiplication and division.) Despite that did well enough on the math placement test to be put in the highest math group where I felt like an imposter. In jr. high, was invited to participate in a program for mathematically talented youth at our state’s flagship, but had nobody to drive me there. Was relieved, because the idea seemed so lonely. And who would have been able to help me if I got stuck on homework? Did very well in math classes all through high school. Did very well on the SATs, not perfect in either M or V, but close. Did very well in the 1 math class I took in college --never missed a single point, actually, in a class taught by a prof known for his rigor. He invited me to become a math major, but I figured he was mistaken; if he had realized how totally “lost” I had been before finally breaking through on some of those proofs, he would have realized I wasn’t mathematically talented. I did not understand until recently (actually from reading @DadTwoGirls posts) how normal it is to sweat it out during problem sets. It did not help that the math department was heavily male, and literally stinky (lots of BO in an unventilated classroom in the basement.)
Anyway, I became a bio major instead, and eventually a doctor.
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The epic tech fail I always like to point to is the original Apple Health app which completely neglected menstrual cycle tracking. No team with a woman on it would have forgotten that.
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You are part of the statistics we are discussing. Women who opted to be a doctor instead of going into math or tech!
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Same here! I was at a DoD school for my early elementary years. It was excellent overall, but when we moved back stateside, I found my grade had already learned the multiplication tables and was moving on, while I was still frantically adding up groups of numbers praying the teacher wouldn’t call on me. I never really caught up and planted myself firmly in the liberal arts. It wasn’t until my daughter was struggling with algebra and I sat down to work with her that I realized how fun it was and how much sense it made. Her teacher mentioned the idea that the brain needs to reach a certain maturity level for higher math to click (nothing to do with intelligence). That made a lot of sense to me and certainly seemed to apply in my daughter’s case, as Calc is now her favorite subject.
At the same time, despite a BA in Foreign Affairs, I managed to fall into a career working for and with engineers. My daughter has seen some of the work that goes on in my company and it was enough to convince her she wants to be a MechE.
So maybe it’s a combo of a) realizing even if you initially struggle with math, it doesn’t mean you aren’t cut out for it, and b) exposure to the wide variety of amazing things you can do with a STEM degree.
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LOL, yes I remember this so well!
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Society needs to make changes in promotions.
The problem is- you promote yourself, someone that looks like you.
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Taking off from the amazing things you can do with math and computer science thought. There is a common misconception that all tech jobs require you to just sit at your computer and work by yourself (coding all day). The opposite is true. The most important tech jobs require you to work with a lot of people - other tech co-workers, people who own the data you work with, users who give you requirements for the work you do, etc. The people with good people skills - the ability to work with all kinds of people - are the ones who end up as higher level managers in tech. Sometimes that very nerdy man just can’t cut it with people (he may still make oodles doing some very specific programming). Maybe this is something that needs to be explained early on to young women thinking about which science path to follow. Yes, you will deal with people as a doctor, but guess what in many tech jobs you will also deal with people.
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I think it would be helpful if the early CS classes incorporated some of that project work into their curriculums, but sadly those intro classes were very solitary for my D.
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I read your post and I thought this made the 1980s sound like the dark ages, like in Hidden Figures! 
I started college in 1983, close to the peak on that graph (yes, I’m female). Before that, in high school I remember having a dog eared copy of The C Programming Language. We had a couple of computer terminals in our high school attached to a mainframe somewhere. I wrote some game about horse racing where you had to manage a stable of horses and compete in races… And my part time job in high school was at a publisher, where I mostly worked on the computer doing typesetting. I remember typesetting a book on FORTRAN, among other things (ok, so maybe it WAS the dark ages 
)
My first year in college I worked in the computer lab where we had Osbornes and a lot of my job was helping people retrieve files from damaged floppy disks. We also had a mainframe running (I think) VMS, and I got in BIG TROUBLE for writing multiplayer games for that thing (because there was some dumb rule that no user was allowed to interact with files on anyone else’s account).
This is all just to paint a picture of the technology level around that time (which was a bit farther along than punch cards), and how it didn’t seem particularly inaccessible to me, a girl.
So I was thinking, what happened around '84/'85 that changed things for women?
Here’s what this Slate article has to say:
One explanation is the rise of the personal computer. Those computers were marketed in part as toys (you can play Pong !)—and they were also marketed at boys.
(…)
By the mid-’90s, students arriving at college to study computer science had already been playing with computers for much of their lives. They were also all almost all male—and boys were twice as likely as girls to have been given computers for gifts as children.
Indeed, I remember getting the first 128K Mac in 1984 when I was a freshman in college. And then the Amiga came out in 1985 (I remember being excited about that)! It was a different experience from the older PCs and mainframes which had a text based interface. On these new computers with graphics on the screen, you could play graphical games instead of text games.
By the time these things were coming out, I was already in college, had my own income and already saw myself as competent with computer stuff… but for kids younger than me (or who hadn’t had the exposure I had in high school), I can totally see how a much bigger gender split could start to happen right around then, if boys were getting gaming computers at home and developing a gaming subculture, while (most) girls were not.
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IMO, childcare is still a huge challenge for women. Access to care and cost are major issues. Obviously, this affects both women and men - but I am seeing women my D’s age stressing about this, and I see it affecting them in terms of the employment they choose.
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My spouse, who works in engineering, is an official mentor at his company to a few women (he jokes “I put the men in mentoring around here”–he realizes that these women would be better served by having a female mentor but beggars can’t be choosers.) Anyway, at his company, various positions now allow work from home. He routinely mentors a young URM woman by Zoom who about half the time is at home and simultaneously doing childcare for her toddler and baby! She had to change a toddler diaper blowout once in the middle of one of their meetings! Imagine having to work like this. So yes, childcare is still a responsibility that falls on women and thus a barrier women face.
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