She mentions her field of STEM (mechanical engineering) has a particularly low percentage of women among its members, and cites another site. On that site, there is this interesting list:
39% of chemists and material scientists are women;
27.9% of environmental scientists and geoscientists are women;
15.6% of chemical engineers are women;
12.1% of civil engineers are women;
8.3% of electrical and electronics engineers are women;
17.2% of industrial engineers are women; and
7.2% of mechanical engineers are women.
Does anyone have an explanation as to why chemists and material scientists have such a relatively high percentage of women?
The two highest are science, as opposed to engineering, so it could be that science in general is more women friendly than engineering, but even if we just look at the engineering disciplines on that list, there still is a big difference among them. Why would chemical engineering be much more women friendly than mechanical engineering?
I'm a woman. I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta in the 11th grade, a college level math honor society. I didn't take any math my senior year in high school because I would have had to go to school an hour earlier to take the class they made available to the three people who qualified for it (the other two students did opt to go in early -- but I have serious health problems that had not yet been identified). So I got to college and was told I could either retake trig or enroll in calculus. I did not want to retake trig and I enrolled in calculus. Having had no math the year before, I ended up dropping out of calculus. I still feel scarred by the experience.
Years later, when I was going back to college and trying to choose a major, I knew I wanted to do something with the built environment. I went through university catalogs and looked at what different majors entailed. I took "civil engineering" off the list pretty early in the process because of the requirement to take multiple calculus classes.
Women often do not have great math backgrounds. They may do fine in math up through middle school, but often start falling behind in math in high school. It is not clear if this is because of social factors or innate lack of ability. But it is a known phenomenon. So I would wonder if the ones where women are very seriously underrepresented are the ones with the most significant math requirements. If that doesn't check out, I don't know what I would look at next. But that is the first thought that comes to mind for me.
Based on two recommendations, I went and read the slatestarcodex article. I too enjoyed it greatly, though I had a methodological quibble or two.
The main reason I'm commenting is because I want to note that the entire point of the article you linked is to debunk the articles in the third paragraph (none of which I have read).
I know. Initially, I wanted to link the article I've read, however, Google referred me to this slatestarcodex article, so I figured I would directly link to a discussion about it.
Women make up about 50% of undergrad chemistry degrees. On the other hand, they make less than 20% of physics/math degrees (engineering funnels). I don't have any real idea why women are so low in math and physics, but I suspect you'd have to look back much further in time.
I studied math in Slovenia. There were about as many female as there were male students. In financial mathematics (and e.g. pharmacy, IIRC), there were more women than men. On the other hand, in computing and physics there were more men than women.
I am very inclined to think this is mainly a matter of preference. On the other hand, maybe the situation in the US is completely different, and Slovenia is just so much more equal when it comes to sex (e.g. the unadjusted gender wage gap is only 2.5% for Slovenia).
Chemistry is often seen as a "softer" science out of the others on the list with supposedly more work/life balance. That was how it was explained to me as a woman when I declared that I was going to study electrical engineering in college. A lot of people tried to steer me towards chemical engineering but I was horrible at chemistry and my interests were more aligned with electrical engineering so I stuck with it.
I agree that (early) science is friendlier to women than (early) engineering. Another factor might be that, if all else is equal, pick the major that already has some women, so you have some peers.
Maybe it's due to Marie Curie, arguably the most renown female scientist? Eventhough she did Physics and Chemistry she's mostly portrayed as a chemist I think.
Maybe women on average just prefer some jobs more than others?
Really, I'm sure there are millions of factors that enter into to those stats -- about one for every woman because everyone woman is unique with her own goals and tastes -- but I think the occam's razor for this topic is that men and women on average have different preferences. Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?
The bottom line, whatever the reason for discrepancies, is in your daily professional life to treat both sexes the equally.
There are few things in discourse I hate more than this sort of "just", the kind of ignorance-encouraging, status-quo-supporting "just" that tells people to stop thinking.
Given that we have a millennia-long history of gender discrimination and given that women got the vote less than a century ago, this "just" is ridiculous.
I guess in 1970 women "just" didn't like medicine or law. (That's certainly what people said then.) And now, using your helpful explanatory framework, they "just" do! It's unexplainable! Things just happen without relation to other things. Who could possibly know anything?
Hmm... Sometimes even I say "maybe women just prefer [...]", but actually mean exactly that, what you said: There are social trends and in this case there is a social trend specific to women wrongly being taught that they are not as good as men in STEM fields. So much in fact (here in Germany) that it's kind of unsettling, when they tell you "haha I'm just not good in math haha" and you can't even, because it's so effing wrong.
I believe many (young) people will tell you that women are "just" like that, but actually mean "they are just taught to think so", because in their male position there is no need to choose are careful wording. I'm also pretty sure that, while the society at large is fault for this herd thinking about this, the parents play the biggest role in where the daughter places herself in the world.
Could be, but a lot of people take that "just" as meaning "there are essential gender differences rooted in the very fabric of the universe, so there's no point in talking about it". So if I were trying to point at the social factors that shape general preferences, I'd look for a phrasing that can't be taken for a call, as here, to ignore those factors.
>Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?
Why would you compare socio-economic inequalities to taste in media? That would be like comparing national budgets to a lemonade stand and asking why we don't put the same effort into managing a 12-year old's summer business.
These issues have entirely different scopes and priorities, and your comparison is invalid based on that alone.
Why do we test drugs on mice when it is their effect on humans that we actually care about (almost no one actually cares about lowering high blood pressure or addressing erectile dysfunction in mice)?
Answer: because understanding what happens in mice might give us some insight into similar mechanisms in humans, and it is easier to do many tests and experiments on mice.
Same goes for media tastes. Factors that lead to gender difference in media preferences might also lead to gender differences in employment (either by affecting what jobs women seek, or affecting how employers perceive candidates), and it might be easier to gather data on media preferences.
>Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?
What is this question suggesting? Is it saying that media preferences and employment differences are similar in such a way that the fact that we do not investigate media preferences means we should not investigate employment differences?
What you are saying is different: that investigating one will give you information about the other. I don't really disagree with that. I disagree with the implication that employment differences are to be trivialized as 'matters of preference,' and thus not worth investigating.
> I disagree with the implication that employment differences are to be trivialized as 'matters of preference,'
I dont think that's trivializing the issue at all. Millions of people in the world with different preferences in all manner of things from movies to professions is hardly trivial. What's trivializing is thinking we can do some studies and find some kind of root cause of what is really an average of millions of personal choices.
I don't even know what you're talking about. People have preferences for a reason. It's not a static property of reality. So what if men don't like Twilight? We could easily rewrite Twilight if we wanted so that they do.
Women don't like STEM? Change STEM so that they do. What do preferences have to do with anything? We don't have to abide by them.
Preferences are not a problem, social inequalities are a problem.
> Preferences are not a problem, social inequalities are a problem.
Exactly. Preferences are not a problem. Social inequalities are a problem. However, neither of those are easily directly measurable. So we do indirect measurements on things like gender participation in a given career. When we measure unequal participation in a field, I think we are too quick to attribute it to social inequalities when perhaps it is more personal preference. That's the only point I'm trying to make... My movie preference analogy confused my point. Sorry about that.
EDIT: I have a clearer analogy for you. Imagine that we lived in a world where the US watched lots of action films and Spain watched lots of documentaries. Furthermore, imagine that there was a lot of money and power flowing into the documentary industry, and that the action film industry is relatively dry.
That's a proxy for socioeconomic inequality. Now what you are trying to argue is that Americans just might prefer action films. Ok... great. Americans prefer action films. But why?
So we go out there and we ask Americans how they feel about documentaries:
"They are boring. We'd prefer not to watch them."
Hypothesis confirmed! So we ask them why the prefer action films:
"Because they are in English. All the good documentaries are in Spanish."
Ding ding ding! Of course Americans prefer action films! They don't have access to good documentaries! Why would they prefer documentaries when they are all in Spanish?
---
So when you ask why women prefer not to work in STEM, you'll learn something about the cause of the social inequality. Saying it's a "matter of preference" tells you nothing. It just sounds like you're trying to invoke a naturalistic fallacy and stop investigating.
Maybe if you invested more in good English documentaries, they would be quite popular. Maybe the preference would disappear. So it doesn't matter if there's a preference. What matters is why there is a preference.
I think you have to challenge your perception professional preference has to be gender-balanced, or else there is something wrong going on.
Men and women are physiologically different. They have an intrinsically different hormonal and social development path. Their movie preference shows this well: you can't possibly think that even in an "ideal" society men and women would prefer exactly the same movies? Why would they prefer the same professions? Surely you've met some nurses and seen why it might be a popular occupation among women?
The "preference" model hints what part of gender unbalance would be present even in an ideal world, and the rest we should address. That's the point you're missing here.
>I think you have to challenge your perception professional preference has to be gender-balanced, or else there is something wrong going on.
Why? What are my goals? Why should I be assuming that women should not have the same opportunities as men with regard to professional preference?
>Men and women are physiologically different. They have an intrinsically different hormonal and social development path.
Obviously. But the culture of business doesn't have any innate hormonal path, so why should it conform to mens' hormones and not women's? Why can't we change the realities of STEM to create a balance?
What is it about STEM that makes it incapable of accommodating different brain chemistry?
>The "preference" model hints what part of gender unbalance would be present even in an ideal world
An ideal world would have gender inequality? Got it.
>Surely you've met some nurses and seen why it might be a popular occupation among women?
Are you serious right now? Explain this to me. Why do women prefer to be nurses? Tell me all about how nursing requires vaginas and estrogen.
> But the culture of business doesn't have any innate hormonal path, so why should it conform to mens' hormones and not women's? Why can't we change the realities of STEM to create a balance?
"Business" is far different from the realities of mechanical engineering, industrial engineering, etc -- which go from very specific courses in education to certain work environments.
For example, take children of age ~7. Boys love playing with cars; girls do like them a bit too, but it's pretty clear they prefer simulating social interactions, specially dolls talking. Should we address this imbalance too? That would be like making a toy which is a car with a doll strapped on it's back and forbidding all other toys -- we'll achieve equality, but won't it be artificial? Will boys and girls actually be happier with their toys?
I'm not claiming all unbalance in STEM comes from preference, I'm claiming some may come, and it's important to recognize that to effectively address the situation.
>"For example, take children of age ~7. Boys love playing with cars; girls do like them a bit too, but it's pretty clear they prefer simulating social interactions, specially dolls talking."
Bullshit. Do you have a source for this, or are you just unaware of how bigoted this is? It is not 1950. I am not going to agree that "girls like dolls and boys like trucks" without some reliable evidence. I'm sure if you marketed trucks to girls long enough and dolls to boys long enough, they would prefer the opposite just fine. Here's what you've been arguing:
Left handed people prefer not to use scissors.
Therefore, scissor manufacturers shouldn't bother to make left-handed scissors.
This is in spite of the fact that, when asked *why* they
don't like scissors, they tell you "because they are
uncomfortable to use."
"Left handed people prefer not to use scissors because they are uncomfortable, therefore we should not make comfortable scissors for left handed people."
I'm sorry that I'm unwilling to jump on your circular logic bandwagon to defend your obvious bigotry.
PS> I'm still waiting for you to explain why women should be nurses and men should be doctors.
If you don't believe boys and girls have some fundamental differences in personality maybe you need to get away from your monitor and interact with a child.
You can find countless studies of gender distinction in just about every physiological/psychological aspect, just google it. (your point about handedness is very poor since humans have bilateral symmetry, unlike genders; although some asymmetric brain specialization actually seems to create some fundamental differences in the way left handed people think)
If you didn't get this after all this discussion I'm afraid you never will.
>PS. I didn't suggest women would prefer nursing to clinician work, but it's fairly obvious they would prefer nursing over truck driving.
Or maybe some companies in some industries took discrimination/diversity issues more serious at an earlier stage than others, leading to a disproportionate number of applicants in those fields. It's often misleading to assume everyone began at the same position on some imaginary starting line, and that present discontinuities are thus reflective of fundamental differences.
> Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?
FYI, there is a root cause in social pressure for this.
The two highest are science, as opposed to engineering, so it could be that science in general is more women friendly than engineering, but even if we just look at the engineering disciplines on that list, there still is a big difference among them. Why would chemical engineering be much more women friendly than mechanical engineering?