Why are there significantly less women in S.T.E.M fields, what we can do to help

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Is it because of social pressure on women? Or are there any other reasons?
What can I do, as a person to make a change in this statistic?

[I_am_not_mafia]

I found this very interesting ...

When Women Stopped Coding

Up until 1984 37% of computer science graduates were female. And then it started to decline. The main cause seems to be that personal computers being sold to boys only and not to both genders.

I'm a woman working in Computer Science and there have been many times now that I've wished that I could move to another career or had chosen differently, especially when I lived in Germany. When I went to university about 10% of the students were women. I can count a total of four other female programmers as colleagues over a 20 year career.

I'm working as a software engineer in a world class institute for Biology at the moment and they have an equal gender balance. I've never worked somewhere before where there have been so many women.

From what I can tell people have in mind a certain image when they think of a good programmer. They will then compare everyone to this image. So if they have only ever worked with young, unwashed, white male programmers with Aspergers (just as an example), then they will have far more trouble truly believing in the ability of a candidate who is a different race, gender, demographic or lifestyle choice. So this doesn't just affect women. I've seen explicit ageism take place when hiring for example even though I wasn't the target of it.

This doesn't just result in not being hired, but being paid less, fewer promotions, not being valued as much and being given fewer opportunities.

The only thing any of us can do is to be consciously aware of your own unconscious biases in the workplace. We all have them.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

I applaud you Mathilda. We need more women like you.

[Alex K]

When I studied physics in Ger, we also had 10% women. It's a miracle that I am married to one of them. But other countries really do better. Starting next year, the most important person in fundamental physics will be a woman - from Italy...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabiola_Gianotti

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

I don't understand why there are less women in STEM though.
I know really smart girls, well less in comparison to men but they are still pretty freaking smart.
This girl I knew in 10th grade was like my arch enemy, intellectually of course. The sad part was that she defeated me in my own game, very often, which is kind of shocking cos I never nobody have ever owned me in my own game like she has. Which made me in furious and then I kind of liked her. I wish there were more women with the mental capacity like her's

[Alex K]

In Germany, it starts with young women simply mostly choosing different careers after finishing school. It must be a subliminal message that it simply isn't for them. I'll work hard to keep that away from my daughter.

Sometimes it is not so subliminal. My wife who is 32 now actually and unbelievably got told by her physics teacher that higher maths is not really for her because she is a girl. I couldn't believe that this was still possible in the 90s. Now she has a phd in theoretical physics. Others get their spirit crushed by this shit.

[robvalue]

I heard once that women are generally less good at certain things, like 3D visualisation and such. But I heard more recently the idea that if there are trends like this, it could be down to gender stereotyping and pushing boys more in academic fields than girls. As sadly mentioned above by Alex.

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

I think it's very shitty of anyone to tell someone regardless of their gender that they are inherently bad with anything because of their gender.

Honestly if I had a daughter and someone told her that she should just give up on the idea of whatever she likes the most because she's a girl. I will fucking kick the shit out of that person, regardless of their gender, ha!

[robvalue]

I totally agree. I don't know how true that "trend" really was, I can't even remember where I heard it now. But take for example a repressive religious country where women don't get to do hardly anything except cook and have babies. You'd fully expect the result to be women with less developed skills in some areas, but not because women are inherently worse at anything.

I hope this kind of shit dies out soon. It seems to be getting better in the West, at least.

I'm good at maths, but my A level female tutor could beat the shit out of me with the wet end of an x anyday.

[thesummerqueen]

There was a podcast about this - it was either Point of Inquiry or Science for the People - and they were trying to apply actual statistics to this question. They said one way they saw a bump in STEM participation with girls was to actually tell girls there were fewer women in STEM. Just encouraging them to join wasn't enough. I don't remember all of it, but you might want to look it up.