Why are there so few women in physics and engineering?
i don’t know i graduated with a bsee in 1982 went to school on a full scholarship and maintained a 3.8 or better all 4 yrs. i was one of two women in the course and the only to graduate things have gotten some what better .its also extremely hard to be a female and earn respect in the field i had to fight my way up and constantly prove myself (even with what is considered excellent credentials)it was especially difficult when dealing with foreign clients. my sons girlfriend is going to college this fall and is hoping to become an engineer i hope things will be easier for her .
It’s a bunch of complex reasons why men and women don’t go into fields that are dominated by one gender. In high school, I was ok at some math and science but not others and believed the myth that girls weren’t good at them anyway. I had hoped that was changing, but..I don’t see a big push encouraging boys to take english and social sciences either. It’s a mixture of sexism and economics that affect boys and girls occupation choices. In high school I had male teachers mock me because I did better than boys in some subjects. I didn’t care because I wanted to get out of that backwater, but it wasn’t easy to do well in that atmosphere. I went into natural resources in college and was treated like I was looking for an MRS, quite a change from high school. First I was an egghead nerd, then I was a gold digger looking for a husband. I hated it since I really wanted outdoor ed, but had a bad adviser and didn’t know there was a program at my university. I gave up and studied psych as it intere
People vary. People have different aptitudes. There are some aptitudes more common in one sex than the other. Thus, it may be the numbers never become 50/50. There’s a deep structural bias in academia and other areas, for those willing and able to devote their late teens, though thirties to their careers. Most people want to procreate. Men can either postpone this, or consign it to their partners; women don’t have this choice. If you look at who’s in which field, that includes many decades’ worth, including before there was any movement toward equal rights for women. The equal performance of females in high school math is really recent; we won’t be seeing the fields filled with the current high school generation for decades. (there’s a time lag) Scholarships are only one aspect. If some people are discouraged from something, as long as they remember, encouraged in some other field, that will cut down the numbers (females tend to be “counseled” into some fields, out of others). Once in
I think this goes back to the whole “gender roles” bit. We aren’t really taught to be interested in those subjects at all. I go to a school with mostly women (literally like 85% female), and my male Economics professor was constantly trying to recruit those of us who got A’s in his class to go into economics haha. Also, I think I heard somewhere that men… something with being male… have an interest an building and finding out why things “work”. I dont know. But I do think more women are getting interested, a close family friend of mine majored in chemistry. and I love quantum physics! Weird you asked this cause I’m watching a video on it and a very enthusiastic young girl is the one presenting! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=… I think we should try to tell young women that this isnt just geeky uninteresting guy stuff.. but other than
