Women in STEM

And finally, workplace culture. It is still a barrier. One thing which pisses me off is that I don't know a woman working in STEM who hasn't been asked to do some sort of outreach work. All my male colleagues - far more numerous in number than we are, and therefore, by default, form the culture - most of them have never been asked to do anything like that (unless they're my immediate colleagues.) It's just not on their radar - they're not against there being more women in IT, but as long as they're not actively groping female colleagues, then they're not part of the problem, so they don't need to do anything. But while they are in such a majority, they do need to do something, because women are not the problem. But men don't see the drip, drip, drip cumulative effect of all the little things which don't mean anything on their own, but together add up to contribute to the high attrition rates of women in their 30s and 40s in tech (don't know about other STEM areas.)

I know they aren't deliberately excluding me with signs saying, "beware, men working behind doors" - but it's no less dangerous when I am lifting floor tiles in the datacentre to work on cabling. It does show that men are the default and it's just unthinking. I doubt any of my male colleagues have been assumed to be a secretary (like anyone has secretaries these days...) None of them will have had visiting field engineers commenting on how unusual it is to see a man in the datacentre. And I suspect most of them don't stop to think, why aren't there more women in datacentres, why did I assume she was a secretary rather than a Unix systems administrator?

Someone asked me today if our company ever goes put to schools, because his child will be going to a school specialising in STEM, which works with local businesses - I reeled off a load of local schools we've done STEM events with, mock interviews, careers fairs, all sorts. Men aren't interested (we've put stories up on the intranet about it,) and don't it think about it until it affects them. Women in STEM are forced to think about it all the time. Men need to step up and do their bit - it has to involve them because they are the majority.

And history - women have almost been written out of history in technology (I focus on computing more than other areas of STEM, because it is my job.) But early pioneers in computing were all women - men mos just muscled in when they saw there was money to be made.

Make sure people learn about Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, Grace Hopper, Stephanie Shirley, the ENIAC women, the Bletchley Park women and many others, as well as they learn about Alan Turing, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and so on. (And as I said, watch Hidden Figures.)

The other sciences all have their female pioneers, too. Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Rosamund Franklin, Dorothy Hodgkin and so many more. There are resources online to make sure we don't forget them.

We specialise way too early in education in this country. Not everyone knows what they want to do when they're choosing their GCSE options. But we can be too rigid in our expectations in the workplace, too. A degree in computer science is useful, and I do use it in my techy job - but I would say I use the skills from my history degree far more - critical thinking, analysing lots of data, questioning the validity of data and so on. It's the computer science degree which gets me interviews; it's the history degree which makes me better than many of my colleagues who have had the same technical training as me. But my manager and others thinks history is a complete waste of time. But we need a wide range of skills in STEM careers - obviously there are roles where you need degree-level physics or biology or maths or chemistry or engineering - but not all of them. Most jobs involve working with other people, and if hard science is the only thing you've got, that may hold you back, too. (I am biased - I have degrees in history and computing, and I was always an all-rounder at school.)

I do think teachers should get more training in technology. I have heard tales of primary school teachers who have said to their class, "oh, I don't really understand how that works." What message does that give out, when their not confident with using their own tech? And there are still some teachers who find it acceptable to believe that girls just aren't as good at maths and science. Well, no, they won't be, if they have that sort of attitude and all the unconscious bias and stereotyping to deal with.

There are also brilliant teachers out there, but it shouldn't be a question of luck that you get a good one.

I don't have the power to change education in the next year, though.

Parents are important. A lot of people I was at school with are in similar fields to their parents - teaching, nursing, law. We know of acting dynasties. It's easier to get into a field if you know about it, how it works. If you never even talk about STEM careers at home, you're reducing the chances of your children considering it. If you don't know about the vast range of STEM and STEAM roles available - and none of us knows some of the careers which will be open to today's year 1s, because a lot of those jobs don'the exist yet - but if you don't know, there are tons of STEM-related resources available these days.

Get them curious. When I was about 8, I remember my grandmother showing me she could bend a knife in a glass of water. I didn't understand about reflection and refraction for a few years, but she was introducing me to that.

My parents instilled skills of research and fact-checking, because their answer to my questions was invariably "go and look it up!" I realised in later years that half the time this was also because they didn't know the answer, but we all learned. You don't need a house full of reference books these days, because we all have Google in our pocket. Don't tell your children you were "never any good at that stuff", and make it sound like it's socially acceptable to be rubbish at maths or science - fob them off with finding out things!

Olennys Omg I adore the science lab set! I love pink and lilac. I love science and I love fashion. What some wrong with pink.

There's a whole load of stuff.

First - it's a cultural problem. It's a problem for the UK, the USA, Australia, NZ, Canada, northern Europe. It's less of an issue in the other parts of world, though obviously, some areas have different problems to deal with. But, being a cultural problem which isn't global means it's not biologically innate, and therefore, can be fixed.

One of the cultural aspects is popular culture. The main STEM examples we see in popular culture are the Big Bang Theory and the IT Crowd - very stereotypically socially awkward geeks. Or films about Alan Turing and the like, where they are so very mathematically minded, their work is way beyond what most of us can conceive. It's important to know those stories, but only a few people will ever reach those heights of academic maths. (But if you haven't, everyone should watch Hidden Figures because it's brilliant.)

We need a soap opera character where she just happens to work in IT because that's an entirely normal, obtainable job - which for the bulk of STEM jobs it is.

The RAF are doing a huge amount of STEM work this year as part of RAF100. My base is running monthly events for local schools and all the national events will have a STEM
presence

I think making children both girls and boys take Science at GCSE goes a long way to putting them off.
Most girls I know through my dd and older ds's weren't the slightest bit interested in STEM subjects, weren't geeky and didn't want to do Sciency subjects.
Leave them alone and let them choose what they do want to do instead of taking up a min of 2 GCSE's on something they have no interest in.

Then concentrate on the kids that do want to take Science past KS3, rather than wasting time on those who hate it.
Encourage the interested girls, give them opportunities, spend the budget on those who want to do it.

Terf - because it's pink plastic and Nikki (not Barbie herself) gets to make a sodding washing machine and clothes rack

This science lab set is better, though again it's not Barbie herself who gets to do the clever stuff. Barbie does, however get to be a baby doctor (with Serious Glasses), a bakery owner and paleontologist in Very Short Shorts

(I love the ethos behind the Barbie career dolls, but they do fall down in the execution IMO)

“secondary is too late”

I see what you’re getting at here, but really it’s never too late. Particularly in technology - there’s this received wisdom that we have to teach 5yos to code, and it’s the end of the world that barely any girls do computing GCSE (which IS shit, not saying it’s not). But I recently met some of my company’s software engineering apprentices, which was really interesting ... So, the bad news, we met two young women and three young men from a cohort of 15, and when I asked how many of th female apprentices we just met - all bar one. So 20% female. Not great. But what was fascinating was those two had no prior programming experience, and had caught up with, and in some cases overtaken, their bedroom hacker’ male peers. Alas I didn’t get to ask how on earth, age 17 or 18 with no coding experience, you decide you want to do an apprenticeship in software engineering ... I must try to track them down and ask them.

Further down the road, DH has just been telling me about a speaker at work from Amazon Web Services - degree in political science, sales background, now in fairly hardcore technology (she was definitely not just doing a sales pitch from his description).

Olennas I actually really like this toy. Why so dismissive?

I'm just going to leave this here (warning: not good for high blood pressure)...

BobbinThreadbare123

So many girls in bloody biology A Level

This is actually fantastic! The next decade will see biology transformed into a computer and bigdata-based science with massive opportunity for some of the girls now doing A-Level biology. Being a professional biologist without computer-programming skills will be considered highly unusual. Bioinformatics, systems biology and personalised medicine will see many women being able to move into important STEM careers. There are many women currently studying bioinformatics in UK universities.

That's really interesting @noble - was that what you found from talking to the students or was it part of a wider study?

I looked into why more boys than girls were taking A-level maths at my school - one of the reasons is that boys and girls do about equally well in GCSE maths BUT girls outperform boys in every other GCSE subject (this is nationally). Boys who do well in maths then tend to take A-level maths because it’s their best result. Girls who have a good result in maths tend to have a wider choice of subjects where they have done well and so we lose some potential candidates to other subjects.

I’m STEM, biology. I’d say females outnumber males at ground level, less so in the heights of academia.

As pp the roles tend to be full time and not flexible in the corporate world. Friends left when they had a baby because the p/t offered was unworkable.
I have a p/t role and I am hanging on to it!

In those horrendous Disney "Hannah Montana" type programmes the characters interested in science are usually portrayed as geeky, socially awkward and "like, way less cool than the cool kids" hair flick. Gendered toys don't help. Girls are encouraged to nurture their baby Annabelle whereas boys learn how to build towers and play with tractors/trains/diggers. Boys clothes often feature planes/cars etc whereas girls tend to have butterflies or birds for example. Personally, I love a good chaffinch design and I realise this alone won't change much, but all the small elements of social conditioning add up and ultimately results in my 10 year old niece not signing up to the coding class because "it's for boys".
I was good at maths and science in school but never enjoyed them like I did English. How much of this is down to my actual personality or what I believed I "should" be interested in I don't know.

I meant to comment on Fermat's post about the girl/boy imbalance in STEM events. I read a while ago that one of the London unis (can't remember offhand which) was running STEM events for schools, but they required that the participants were 50:50, and that this was having a positive effect encouraging girls to consider stem careers. I can't find anything about it googling now ... does that ring a bell with anyone?

That shouldn't be a sweat with Kayla link

Try again:

Just to add a different spin on this; STEAM (add in arts) is another option to champion STEM in schools; as it adds the element of creativity which may appeal to girls already internalising gender stereotypes but also brings the vitally important element of creativity to these subjects.

These subjects are best taught creatively too. I have an art background but I always saw the very strong links to science and STEM - I had to use acid in printing, work out firing temps, learn about solutions, engineer installations etc.

I have always been struck by the mathematician who keeps a sketch book for example, Sir Rodger Penrose. (www.thebigdraw.org/the-big-draw-2016-festival-theme)

There's also evidence that studying the arts appears to increase attainment in the sciences / STEM subjects.

Three links demonstrating the power of adding in A to STEM.

And anything by OK GO, they've now created teaching resources to support many of their videos.

okgosandbox.org/#intro

I feel very lucky that I had creative and engaging teachers and my parents helped me see links between the arts and sciences. People often would say "you're so artistic and creative" when inside I felt more like a scientist to be honest when I made/ make art.

I think schools and the government need to join the dots a bit more.

This is something I'd like to get involved with, but don't know how (and IRL I'm somewhat socially reticent). I have a >30 year career writing scientific software ... but nearly all of it working from home. I really am invisible, except of course to my DD. She had a more or less optimal set of conditions (DH is also a scientist and she went to an all girls' secondary, and her primary had women maths and science 'specialists' - form teachers but they swapped some periods) and yes, she's doing an MEng.

Someone needs to firmly kick me out there, wherever 'there' is...I should have time; I've worked half time ever since DD started school, and refused to consider upping my hours when she was older. My company at the time evidently got the value of retention of expertise. Win-win. Yes, I've been very lucky.

I came across Stemettes work recently. I don’t know how effective they are but it looks like are doing good stuff.

SheepyFun. Yes DH (in IT) has found the same. Initially we wanted to both go part time and co-parent equally but his employer wouldn't even consider it, and asking around he couldn't find another one locally that would. Hence me now being a SAHM