Competition to get girls into STEM won by a boy

The lack of women in STEM puzzles me.
I went to uni in 1992. On my physics course there were about 35 men and 5 women.
A friend switched from physics to chemistry after a few weeks. On the chemistry course it was the opposite, about 40 women, 10 men. This may be unusual, I suppose.
Another friend studied biological sciences where there were many more women than men. I have known loads of female medical students over the years.
I've always worked in bioscience type industries and women are well represented at all levels, including CEOs and professors.
Maybe my experience is just lucky, but there must be some positives to take out of it.

Yep me too Irritable. For me it was the bullying too, that I hadn't really noticed.

And Yy to bolshy, wickedwaterwitch. There was a thread a few years ago about words mainly applied to women. I'll see if I can dig it out.

I think it's a combination of lots of things noblegiraffe, one of which is a lack of visible female role models. Media overwhelmingly defaults to men to talk about STEM subjects. It is overwhelmingly male scientists studied in school? Sexism within schools/parents/society in general must also play a big factor (whether from fellow pupils or teachers). It's like negative reinforcement, you believe you are shit at something therefore you are (there's a more scientific phrase for it in Cordelia Fine's wonderful Delusions of Gender book but I can't remember it!).

Interestingly I think figures for computer degrees used to be much more even, 10-20 yrs ago.

Interesting comments about bolshy ness too - only ever a word applied to women really

Might start another thread another day

Itll, scallops, I worked in software dev for about 15 years. It wasn't until I took a break to have a child and read a few feminist books and reassessed my experiences that I realised how depressingly sexist my working environments had been. Everything I ignored/laughed off/thought of as normal at the time strikes me as horrifying, looking back.

It's bonkers :MASSIVE EYE ROLL: and a huge marketing fail (sorry to state the obvious)

And no I haven't confused you with someone else.

I work in IT too itll. I have a different perspective from you. I haven't called your opinion a 'crock of shit' though as I am well aware you may have different experiences from me.

Maybe it wasn't challenged because it resonated with people?

Oh and btw - i did not express a desire for any respect from you, you must have confused me with some one else.

scallops

I work in software, seeing some describe the industry you've spent most of you're life in as being full of sexist dicks, which is why women (that would be me) do not choose to work in it, is bullshit IME which i would say outweighs vestals and probably your own right. But as usual as the comment was made by a "regular", and it chimes with the theme about how shit it is to be a woman in this society, it was left unchallenged.

Supposing there are any 15 year old girls who read the never ending stream of stuff on here about how crap it is to be a woman in IT and what dreadful obstacles they will face, i hope they find my post refreshing !

one thing I notice among myself and my female colleagues (and we discuss this, because many of us are parents and want what's best for our children) is that we tend to be fully-paid-up members of the bolshy, awkward squad

This in spades, I'm in the Pharma industry which is pretty family friendly and has lots of women in comparison to most science careers but we are all definitely bolshy and awkward. We still see a big drop off of females once you get to a certain grade, it's ridiculous really. Up to a certain level it's 50:50 and then as soon as you get to 'Head of Department' level BAM only a few token women (who nearly all are supposedly 'ball breakers' even the ones I've known for years and know are really nice supportive managers). The latest man to be promoted to HofD is in his 20s has been with the company 4 years (straight out of uni) and was promoted above women with 10+ years more experience.

"The message to me is: Girls should be 'encouraged' into stem but only up to a point. When there's an actually something important going on, like a competition, then boys most be allowed in and they will win." Good post thatstoast. I like the way you've decribed it. It really shows the patronising pat on the head and "now let the men and boys show you how it's done" attitude to a tee.

"Yeah, I'm sure that it's vestal...FFS. Do you work in STEM ? Have you asked any 15 year old girls if they aware that STEM is full of sexist dicks ? What a load of sh1t."

And you wonder why you get arsey replies to you itll? Hardly respectful discussion. Which is what you expect of us.

noblegiraffe

I started maths and further maths A-Levels I ended up dropping out (pregnant) and going back to education as an adult where I did humanities and social sciences. I am now work in a very 'female' profession. Reflecting on my own experiences I would say the following -

I was good at maths but when I got to A-Level it all got a bit too abstract for me. I like my subjects to have people in them. I still love statistics and plan to do a OU statistics degree as soon as my work life calms down a bit. Statistics have people in them, I don't think this is a coincidence.

One of my main motivations for choosing those A-Levels was the fact that is was seen as hard and girls didn't do it.

When I went back to education there was little opportunity to do anything STEM. The closest you got was the access courses for nursing.

Ha, yes, I'm the chief packer when we go on holiday, and I'm the one that drove our large vehicle onto and off ferries, around narrow Italian streets etc. because DP knows I'm the one that's got the spacial awareness (and confidence) to do it.

Yes Pastmy - as a rather good amateur dressmaker, and someone with a PhD on genereal relativistic spacetimes, I've never been able to work out quite how trying to visualise toy models of relativistic spacetimes differs from trying to visualise how the panels of a dress fit together to "hang right". But then, I'm just a fluffy female, what would I know?

(Disclaimer - dressmaking is pleasantly and intuitively Euclidean. And doesn't require a grasp of differential geometry.)

LurcioAgain that "spacial awareness" myth gets my goat every time! Especially as the results cannot be replicated by any subsequent study!

Add stereotyping such as STEM being "Geeky" to the mix...
Young women are pressured into being glamorous/cool, attractive to men. If you are "Geeky" (clever) you'll never get a boyfriend, you will be "ugly" never fit in etc. See how many archetypes in popular culture reinforce these values. See the lack of strong female role models within STEM.

These unconscious/subliminal perceptions are created by our patriarchal society to prevent women from achieving their full potential, and keep women in home-maker/carer roles.

Hmmm.. I work in IT (I'm a programmer - well, I've been doing it a long time, I'm Head of Development level now, but if asked in conversation, I'd say I was a programmer).

I would say, that there is sexism in IT. That I have had men try to do end-runs around my authority, that I have had them not listen to what I've said unless it's confirmed by a man, and that once you venture out into the rest of the business it just gets worse (I had a colleague doing first line support who was horribly harassed, and changed entire careers because of it - the male first-liners were horrified at how she was treated).

I would also say that the road getting here was harder - I was one of the girls hounded out of Physics A-level, I've walked into more lecture theatres and labs as the sole woman than I can remember - and it takes a deep breath sometimes - I completely understand women not wanting to get involved, and it's the bolshy (or oblivious) ones that make it.

My experience of working in STEM is that the men I encounter are if anything less sexist than the population at whole. However, one thing I notice among myself and my female colleagues (and we discuss this, because many of us are parents and want what's best for our children) is that we tend to be fully-paid-up members of the bolshy, awkward squad - because there is enormous social pressure during one's teens not to do maths/physics etc and it takes a certain sort of personality to say "you know what, I don't give a flying fuck" when confronted with that pressure. (In my experience, the pressure comes from society at large, not from men in science - things like putting the chemistry sets in the "boys' toys" aisle, the constant drip-drip-drip of "women are emotional and illogical", the "women just don't have the gift for spatial reasoning that men have" background noise - though I've seen many women say they were told as teenagers not to study physics/maths/chemistry by male teachers - so there's an element of luck to my experience that men within science have been supportive). And we - my female colleagues and I - can't help but wonder how much wasted talent there is out there - women who were potentially just as good at maths and physics as us, but didn't have that sort of fuck-the-lot-of-you personality.

Actually, on a day-to-day level in my workplace (important disclaimer, we have a pretty high number of women by the standards of STEM workplaces), what it means is the women are often more outspoken than the men - because the men cover all personality types from quiet introverts to quite outgoing - because there were no selection pressures on the men to have the personality type to go against the social grain as a pre-requisite. (My workplace is not a feminist nirvana, however - we still have a measurable gender pay gap which has actually widened over the last few years).

Of course there are other areas of STEM where sexism is rife - the computer game design industry seems to be one in spades (see the Gamergate controversy for e.g.)

Yeah, I'm sure that it's vestal...FFS. Do you work in STEM ? Have you asked any 15 year old girls if they aware that STEM is full of sexist dicks ? What a load of sh1t.

Surely any girl with half a brain cell would think 'sexist dicks i'd be better off not going into stem'?

I actually think that the reason why many women don't go into STEM is not because they're not good at it, but because the prospect of spending their entire career among sexist dicks is not very enticing.

If the aim was to get girls into STEM, then the competition should only have been for girls; however as it wasn't (strange decision), maybe this boy's entry was the best.