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Women in STEM: Wins and ways to go The Oxford Scientist
While engineering led one woman’s path, another researcher was driven by her fascination with the invisible world of genes. Smart systems won’t replace engineers, but they will make our work faster, safer, and more precise,” she said. AlShehhi is completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Khalifa University and is now pursuing her PhD in mechanical engineering. “That was when I realised that creativity and engineering can come together to bring ideas to life,” she recalled.
One group of women were informed that men had previously out-performed women on the same calculus test they were about to take. There were three different situations, designed to test the impact of stereotype on performance in math. Individuals who identify strongly with a certain area (e.g., math) are more likely to have their performance in that area hampered by stereotype threat than those who identify less strongly with the area.
Women in STEM
- STEMblazers addresses these disparities by hosting leadership and negotiation workshops for girls, helping them advocate for fair compensation and leadership roles as early as high school.
- From our Women in STEM statistics, it is clear that there is still more to be done to reduce the gender gap in STEM fields.
- Women in STEM fields may not fit individuals’ conception of what a scientist, engineer, or mathematician “should” look like and may thus be overlooked or penalized.
- A 2024 Forbes article also illustrates that 40-50% of women will leave their STEM careers within 5-7 years of starting.
- More girls are in school today than ever before, but they do not always have the same opportunities as boys to complete and benefit from an education of their choice.
Women in STEM fields that have children either need child care or to take a long leave of absence. Women in STEM may leave due to not being invited to professional meetings, the use of sexually discriminating standards against women, inflexible working conditions, the perceived need to hide pregnancies, and the struggle to balance family and work. The majority of the women agreed that mentorship is a crucial resource, and many want to be involved in mentorship, but there are not enough resources or opportunities in their work environment. They added that mentorship helped them complete their degree and guided them from the educational sphere to the workplace.
- There are a variety of proposed reasons for the relatively low numbers of women in STEM fields.
- However, the ratio of male to female and non-binary students has remained the same, at 63% and 37% respectively.
- This study found that girls in same-gender groups performed better on a task that measured math skills than girls in mixed-gender groups.
- Along with women, racial/ethnic minorities in the United States are also underrepresented in STEM.
African American women
However, a 2019 correction to the study outlined that the authors had created a previously undisclosed and unvalidated method to measure “propensity” of women and men to attain a higher degree in STEM, as opposed to the originally claimed measurement of “women’s share of STEM degrees”. A Statistics Canada survey found that even young women of high mathematical ability are much less likely to enter a STEM field than young men of similar or even lesser ability. Assuming equal enrollment for boys and girls, 60 boys and 62 girls are considered “gifted.” By comparing enrollment to the population of persons 20–24 years old, 880 of the 1,000 original women, and 654 of the original 1,000 men will enroll in college (2014). A 2020 study surveyed women who are working in STEM field and live in the U.S., Northeast, and Eastern Canada. In STEM fields, the support and encouragement of a mentor can make a lot of difference in women’s decisions of whether or not to continue pursuing a career in their discipline. What was particularly surprising was that these beliefs by faculty members were most strongly endorsed by female faculty members, rather than male faculty members.
The academic and research environment for women may benefit by applying some of the suggestions she has made to help women excel, while maintaining a work-life balance. The worst scores were from the situation where women were told that men had performed better than women. The last group was told nothing about how men had performed and there was no mention of gender before taking their test.
According to a study about high school and middle school students, there is evidence of a gender gap in science and math test scores. As at 2004, 13.9% of students enrolled in science programs in Cambodia were female and 21% of researchers in science, technology, and innovation fields were female as of 2002. Deciding to pursue a career in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) can feel daunting—especially for girls who often lack visible role models.
The government, along with international organizations, has introduced mentorship programs, scholarships, and leadership training to encourage more women to enter and stay in STEM careers. Due to traditional views and societal norms, women struggle to remain in their careers or to move up in the workplace. UNESCO’s A Complex Formula states that Indonesia’s government has been working towards gender equality, especially through the Ministry of Education and Culture, but stereotypes about women’s roles in the workplace persist. Bias against women, not only in education but in other aspects of life as well, exists in the form of traditional views of men as more powerful and dignified than women, especially in the home and in the workplace, according to UNESCO’s A Complex Formula. The Central Asian countries Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were the only countries in Asia with women as the majority of their researchers, though in both cases it was by a very small margin.
According to UNESCO statistics, 30% of the Sub-Saharan tech workforce are women; this share rose to 33.5 percent in 2018. For a variety of reasons, it is difficult to obtain reliable data on international comparisons of women in STEM fields. UNESCO, among other agencies including the European Commission and The Association of Academies and Societies of Sciences in Asia (AASSA), have been outspoken about the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields globally. The percentage of Ph.D. in STEM fields in the U.S. earned by women is about 42%, whereas the percentage of Ph.D. in all fields earned by women is about 52%. In the Moss study, faculty members were willing to give the male applicants a higher starting salary and career mentoring opportunities. Among more experienced scientists and engineers, the gender gap in salaries is greater than for recent graduates.
Central and South America
Another method to reduce the gender gap is to create communities and opportunities apart from school. To increase women’s enrollment in the STEM field, researchers believe that it should occur in elementary and middle schools. Supporting this hypothesis, another study found that women who were encouraged to draw self-concept maps with many nodes did not experience a performance decrease on a math test. One study found that women who affirmed a personal value prior to experiencing stereotype threat performed as well on a math test as men and as women who did not experience stereotype threat. Female participants who read about successful women, even though these successes were not directly related to performance in math, performed better on a subsequent math test than participants who read about successful corporations rather than successful women. Some studies propose the explanation that STEM fields (and especially fields like physics, math and philosophy) are considered by both teachers and students to require more innate talent than skills that can be learned.
Science professionals
In STEM, women receive 50.1% of bachelor’s degrees, but receive only 44.3% of Master’s degrees, 41% of doctorate degrees, 36% of postdoctoral fellowships, and comprise only 29% of permanent academic employees. Not only are the number of women going into these STEM subjects limited, but when we do, our attainment will be continuously overshadowed. This gendered hierarchy of different scientific disciplines is fuelled by outdated, misogynistic viewpoints. The more women in a scientific discipline, the easier we perceive this discipline to be. I have heard too many times from my peers that ‘biology isn’t a real science’ and that we ‘do no work’. Women are less likely to continue studying STEM at university, and progressively more unlikely to pursue STEM into industry and academia.
Women in STEM workforce
The term STEM was first used in 2001, primarily in connection with the choice of education and career. They worked as mathematicians, engineers, and analysts, laying the groundwork for early space exploration, even though their contributions were often overlooked. The “Computer Women” at NASA during the 1950s and 1960s, a group of women known as “computers” at NASA performed essential calculations for aeronautical and space research. Scholars have discussed possible reasons and mechanisms behind the limitations such as ingrained gender roles, sexism, and sex differences in psychology. Those who view this disparity as resulting from discriminatory forces are also seeking ways to redress this disparity within STEM fields (these are typically construed as well-compensated, high-status professions with universal career appeal).
Strategies for increasing representation of women
However, closing the gender gap will require targeted recruitment and retention efforts. To address this, STEMblazers offers free after-school coding clubs and weekend robotics challenges for girls. Early exposure programs—like robotics and coding workshops run by STEMblazers—have increased girls’ enrollment in AP STEM courses by 35% at partner schools over three years.
Being chronically outnumbered and underestimated can fuel feelings of imposter syndrome reported by many women in the STEAM field. One of the factors behind girls’ lack of confidence might be unqualified or ineffective teachers. N. Pell, the pipeline has several major leaks spanning the time from elementary school to retirement. Some commentators argued that this was evidence of gender differences arising in more progressive countries, the so-called gender-equality paradox.
Stereotypes about what someone in a STEM field should look and act like may cause established members of these fields to overlook individuals who are highly competent. The authors interpreted this to suggest that the underrepresentation of women in the professorial ranks was not solely caused by sexist hiring, promotion, and remuneration. If individuals are given information about a prospective student’s gender, they may infer that he or she possesses traits consistent with stereotypes for that gender. The First Computer Programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician, who is often credited as the world’s first computer programmer.}
For years women have been underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) university courses and occupations. For the 22/23 academic year, 37% of students enrolling into mathematical sciences were female or non-binary. One study found that women steer away from STEM fields because they believe they are not qualified for them; the study suggested that this could be fixed by encouraging girls to participate in more mathematics classes. In middle and high school, science, mathematicsfailed verification, mechanics and computers courses are mainly taken by male students and also tend to be taught by male teachersfailed verification. In 2012, the percentage of women PhD graduates was 47.3% of the total, 51% of the social sciences, business and law, 42% of the science, mathematics and computing, and just the 28% of PhD graduates in engineering, manufacturing and construction.
A 1996 USA study suggested that girls begin to lose self-confidence in middle school because they believe that men possess more intelligence in technological fields. Students’ aspirations to pursue careers in mathematics and science influence both the courses they choose to take in those areas and the level of effort they put forth in these courses. In the United States, research findings are mixed concerning when boys’ and girls’ attitudes about mathematics and science diverge.
Confucian beliefs in the lower societal value of women as well as other cultural factors could influence South Korea’s STEM gender gap. However, women earn about 19–30% less than their male counterparts and are perceived by society to be less suited to engineering than men. According to OECD data, about 66 percent of enrollment in science programs at the tertiary education level in Kazakhstan are women. Women make up just 17.7% of teaching staff at national universities, with only 10.8% in science and pin up aviator game engineering fields and 9.4% in executive positions. Japan has the lowest share of women in tertiary teaching staff among OECD countries, with only 28% of female faculty members, far below the OECD average of 44%. According to OECD data, about 25 percent of enrollment in science programs at the tertiary education level in Japan are women.