Why are there so few women in physics and engineering?
The truth is that obviously people don’t want to admit, is that girls are socialized subtly and overtly out of fields like that, I know, I was one of them. Kids don’t understand that giving in to social pressures is a detriment to their future, and parents often don’t back up their daughters,especially if they were socialized the same way. The top minds percentile wise in my class specifically were 3 to 1 female, but by the time we reached senior year in H.S. the boys were still “geniuses” and the girls had mostly dropped to average classes. It’s not the IQ that changes, it’s something else. Like my algebra teacher that hated girls, or the science club that was all boys and treated me like an intruder, probably because I was just as smart as them. And the female teachers that don’t support their female students, they treat them like competition. It’s all there, people just don’t want to look at it because it’s too much work, easier to let things stay the same. And if someone does try t
I think it comes down to interest more than ability. I’m sure if I really tried I could have done better in math and science in highschool, but the thought of doing that sort of work for life seems incredibly tedious. I think both men and woman can be good in math, but men just seem to enjoy it more.
Because old attitudes die hard. I’m in the life sciences and still regularly face negative feed back from people about being a woman in the sciences, and the stigma isn’t as great here as for things like physics and engineering. Fortunately, for me it’s not so much my colleagues/friends (I wouldn’t keep those ‘friends’) as passing acquaintances, and really what business is it of theirs anyway? Unfortunately, many young women when deciding on careers still get this negative feedback from ‘people that matter’, like their peers, their parents, their siblings, and their teachers and guidance counsellors. On top of that, there is still the message in N. American society as a whole (and I suspect many others, but can’t speak for them) that ‘women are not good at maths and sciences’. Growing up in this context, one cannot help to absorb this message and internalize it, as faulty as it is. Top that off with things like boys still getting the majority of the teachers’ attention in math and scie
There is plenty of evidence to show that women are not generally as good at high level maths and science as men are and that the difference is biological and not social. School level maths and science is not high level. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/09/sham… You ask how do we fix this? I don’t see it as a problem! There is no reason why men and women should be equally good at everything. Male and female brains are quite different on average. Of course in any population there will be variability and some women’s brains are more like men’s brains and vice versa. Anyone, male or female who has the ability to do well in science or mathematics should be encouraged but it would be absurd to try and force equal outcomes for men and women when hard wired skills just cannot be socialised into people! Edit: The excellent article that Gaspari has given a link to shows what is at stake.
