Women in STEM - who is at fault?

Girls (and boys) should probably be in school rather than the workplace.

There is so much sexist claptrap in your post I can barely summon the will to respond.

No, women do not like to gossip/chat more than boys. Football and cars are not topics just for men to be interested in. There may well be issues with being the only woman in a male dominated environment but the things you've described aren't it.

I could just be old fashioned and biased but don't girls like to gossip and chat and boys less so, so that a girl in a male dominated workplace has no one to chat to, unless the subject is football and cars. In the long run this is a minor detail but could it put girls off male environments?

I know other regions did get female applicants, and a few have joined so it's not all grim news.

But I do know female applicants for apprenticeships this year have been well down.

In IT you can easily spend a whole day at your desk without interacting with a single other person.

I dream of those days... mind you, I'm a Java (well, ex-Java, now Scala) developer (well, ok, Senior/architect/CTO - level - but in a startup at the moment) - and none of the people in my team are in the same location. The two closest are at different ends of the UK! And I fit it around my family. BUT that wasn't possible when I was more junior, and isn't possible for my DP who is at a similar level but more in the product side.

I heartily recommend IT for women, and not just good ones, any woman - there are hundreds of mediocre men, lets have some mediocre women too. You will have to deal with the environment, but if you can get through it, it's good pay, the hours can be good, and you can travel the world doing it (no licensing authorities/professional requirements for devs like there are for doctors/lawyers/civil engineers)

That's not good Big. I would love to know why too.

@best we run a very good apprentice programme, most civil engineering consultancies do. We take all ages (Although the intake is primarily aimed at 16 or 18 yo with marketing to local schools and colleges) and will sponsor up to a masters as standard.

For the apprentice positions in our region this year we got 0 female applicants. Yup. 0.

Those routes are open to women, but short of mugging likely looking candidates in the street it very difficult to address the issue when women just arent applying. Thats the issue that needs addressing.

I would love to know why not a single woman applied, but as I and others have said the issue seems to start much much younger.

Best I agree that it would be better in many ways to focus on getting women into IT as second careers - partly cos that's what I did. The high level of social interaction and people skills required to work in a successful Agile team makes career changers very effective.

Best
That's the reason I ended up in STEM. Was doing an Arts course and was very frustrated with it, took a psychometric test, tuned out I was good at spatial reasoning, logic etc so they advised computer science. I did a postgrad in IT and ended up in techie land. Because I could write, I did a lot of bid work and consultant work. You'd be amazed how many gifted male engineers can't string a sentence together.

I do wonder if more psychometric testing would be beneficial. Anyone know of any studies on this?

some careers such as teaching skew heavily female

Guess what - men are overrepresented in management roles in teaching compared to the teaching population.

Also guess what - male headteachers are paid more than female headteachers. On average £4000 more per year.

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/exclusive-disturbing-gender-pay-gap-headteacher-salaries

Don't assume female dominated means female-friendly.

If jobs were more flexible, hours more compatible with family life, maybe more women would be working in STEM

It can be very very flexible. I've been in IT for 30 years, production support DBA, managed it with two DCs, being on call every 3 weeks or so enabled me to take time off during the day if I was called. Flexitime and team work and a good employer is the key.

In IT you can easily spend a whole day at your desk without interacting with a single other person.

You can, but not in my experience, especially with Agile these days, lots and lots of interaction. I speak to people all day long, developers, infrastructure, project managers, testers, change managers, BAs, DBAs.

It is hugely noticeable wherever I've worked that there are almost no women in infrastructure roles. Developers some, Data science yes, DBAs yes. Our Infrastructure team has never employed a woman in the 7 years I've worked for my current company - because the team lead hires people like himself.

I didn't do STEM subjects at degree or A level. I got into IT via a huge Civil Service recruitment drive in the 80s, I sat an aptitude test and they sent me on a 3 month programming course. I never looked back.

I think the industry should look at getting women into tech via less orthodox routes as well as graduate entry. Traineeships, apprenticeships - not necessarily aimed at young people. Many of the best people I've worked with came to IT late - my colleagues included graduates in French, English, history, a former primary teacher, an estate agent.

Thanks Quentin. That occurred to me after I posted. I do hope Polka is a one-off.

This thread seems to be focussing on IT but there are far more science/maths foundation based jobs than that.

Crap link soz www.techworld.com/picture-gallery/careers/uks-top-12-most-in-demand-programming-languages-3612638/

Computer science in this country doesn't actually deliver what IT employers want. They want data scientists, analysts, and data visualisers from the UK, not Java programmers or software engineers (they go to India for that).

Not true. Java is one of the most demand languages in the UK (gallery/careers/uks-top-12-most-in-demand-programming-languages-3612638/) and there is now a trend for onshoring as outsourcing hasn't delivered promised benefits.

The majority of the girls are from Muslim families so not sure if that is a factor or not.

You may find the below interesting martha.
Hilariously I picked this link up from another thread a while ago where a man decided to drop a "fact bomb" about how women aren't disadvantaged in STEM, purely by using one of the graphs, not actually reading the study. It still makes me laugh. Prat.
contexts.org/articles/what-gender-is-science/

I just can't see how you would know mothers were dissuading daughters, it sounds very anecdata to me

lass clumsy wording i meant "one not you personally. It was a generic comment

In IT you can easily spend a whole day at your desk without interacting with a single other person.

I'm not in IT, but I can. Lovely, get much more work done.

In IT you can easily spend a whole day at your desk without interacting with a single other person.

Err...Nope. Or at least, not in my experience.

Anecdata. DD is doing GCSEs this year. She's in the top set for all sciences, which given she is the child of two STEM graduates, is not particularly surprising. At a recent parent/teacher evening her computing teacher (young, male) complained that, despite being the top of the class by a long margin, she didn't stay after school to work on independent projects like her male classmates.

I gently mentioned the social costs to teenage girls around being good at science and how the boys in her class can make her uncomfortable when she out performs them. He insisted that "that sort of thing" did not happen in their school. DD and I then proceeded to describe around a dozen incidents, most of which had happened under his nose that contradicted that statement. I knew of them because DD and to a lesser extent, some of her friends had mentioned them to me. But her teacher had simply failed to notice what was happening in his own classroom or, if he did, failed to acknowledge them as sexism.

Yes. Possibly I am putting my daughter off working in IT. But what I am doing is naming the problem. Now. when she most need to realise it's not her who is at fault.

When I was little I got a Commodore 64 (its programmes ran off cassette tapes). I learned to code it using BASIC and really enjoyed it. No one took any notice. I was, however, told how 'good' my cousin Kevin was with computers and told how fantastic he was at coding. He was doing pretty much the same thing as I was. His coding was seen as evidence of how bright he was, my coding was simply ignored. So I stopped doing it. I studied psychology at uni and later became a primary teacher.

I've now ended up back in an IT-related career. Had anyone given me an ounce of encouragement as a child I could be streets ahead of where I am now. As it stands I'm having to learn coding from scratch. It's shit.

Given that women are generally more sociable than men

I'm not sure that is a given, though. It seems to me that outside of the workplace men engage in social activities more than women do (perhaps partly because women find themselves with less free time due to wifework and childcare).

As others have mentioned, some careers such as teaching skew heavily female. Here's a very recent article from the Guardian on diversity in the publishing industry:

www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/06/uk-publishing-industry-remains-90-white-survey-finds

Ignoring the white/non-white headline, the point relevant to this thread is:

The vast majority of respondents – 84.6% – were female
Four years ago, when research was last conducted, 81.8% of respondents were female

So not only does publishing skew heavily female, it's actually worse than it was four years ago.

My guess is that publishing is a very social career – you're always on the phone or in meetings or interviewing people – whereas STEM is much less social. In IT you can easily spend a whole day at your desk without interacting with a single other person. Given that women are generally more sociable than men, it seems logical that they are drawn towards more sociable careers.

I think with a bit if imagination a lot more jobs could be more flexible. 9 to 5 is the tradition, but unless you are working incredibly closely with a team full.time many jobs could be done remotely, or on site but at odd times.

Yes - the other developers in my team are in california, some of QA is in India, application scientists/support all over the world. Remote and odd times works very well! And it gets easier all the time with skype, fibre broadband etc. Most of the other developers are office based but do some work from home/not 9-5 to accommodate family and avoid the worst of the traffic.

Computer-based jobs have the potential to be the most flexible and family friendly.

Computer science in this country doesn't actually deliver what IT employers want. They want data scientists, analysts, and data visualisers from the UK, not Java programmers or software engineers (they go to India for that).

India has the highest percentage of women studying STEM degrees in the world. Yet when it comes time to marry these women often have to give up their careers because of piss poor childcare options. It's not their mums holding them back in this situation it's a society that doesn't value childcare. Things are changing slowly, and there have already been huge improvements made when maternity leave was enforced (India now provides women a longer maternity leave than the USA).

In the UK my guess is STEM careers haven't traditionally had many female role models. Where are your female equivalents to Stephen Hawking? There are there, we all know they are, but the media ignores them.

I think with a bit if imagination a lot more jobs could be more flexible. 9 to 5 is the tradition, but unless you are working incredibly closely with a team full.time many jobs could be done remotely, or on site but at odd times.