Encouraging Women in STEM.

Exactly errol. If there’s one thing I can’t stand from my years in academia, it’s presenteeism. The “I stayed here until 8 o’clock last night drinking coffee, twatting about on the internet and losing time through my complete lack of organisation“ badge of pride. It’s endemic in academia. I now work in a 9 to 5 environment and I was amazed when I started at how much more efficient everyone is. There’s no reason people can’t work like that in academia (barring time courses).

Wow, that’s pretty insulting to your husbands ex colleagues. Lots of women, like myself, enjoy high pressure jobs. I could completely handle the pressure in academia, I just didn’t see the point because:
A) there is no real need for the pressure, it’s artificially created by a grant funding system that relies on publication of results at an realistic speed. In my experience (and a major reason I left academia), the intense pressure on researchers doesn’t drive research, it leads to high levels of scientific fraud. I saw this repeatedly.
B) what is the point in working in a high pressure environment and half killing yourself when you know that, as a women, your chances of success are already stymied? I frankly couldn’t be arsed fighting the machine anymore. I wanted a workplace that actually valued me.

As I said, it’s not women, it’s the workplace that needs to change. Both at the institutional level but also in terms of the funding model, which harms science itself, not just researchers.

Interestingly, my female friends that have moved into industry have done very well and would argue that is just as high pressure.

How many jobs are of necessity (rather than culture) truly incompatible with being a parents and/or 9-5? In STEM, some medical roles, to be sure, but medicine does attract and retain young women.

Whilst I wanted my daughters to have whatever opportunities they wanted, I also want them to be happy. Whilst one has chosen to to a degree with just 4 other females (out of 36) and a male dominated career where the team she will lead is likely to be 80% male (she still learning) the other chose a female dominated degree, more nurturing and has no set career path.

The highly pressured and competitive stem careers are great for some and not others, remember most men don't work in stem either! Rather than changing job ads we need to educate and encourage all young people to have good skills and to be able to take the right job for them, my dh is a lecturer in a stem subject and of his PhDs all the women have dropped out (after completion) some into scientific publishing, others into "ordinary" jobs because the pressure was too much, they wanted 9-5 jobs. You can't make jobs fit by quota

TheresWaldo - Exactly. There's a lot of money in contracting, if you know the right contacts and what projects are going around.

If you're self employed, it can be good, especially as you gain more experience. I don't know how much the staff from the Indian subcontinent get paid if they are working via an Indian tech company though. I think they still get paid in Indian currency by their company to keep overall costs low. Maybe it's different these days. Either way it will probably still be better than average salaries in India.
It's a running joke amongst us Indians that the only career options deemed acceptable to Indian parents are doctor, engineer, chartered accountant, lawyer etc. :) It's all about money and prestige as that's the only way to secure your future and that of your children. So women will go for such jobs out of pragmatic necessity and cultural pressure to bring in more money for the household.

I come from bio sciences where there is no problem getting women through the door at degree and post grad level but a huge problem with maintaining that representation at senior levels. So you have a situation where most undergrads/phds are female but most lecturers/professors are male. It boils down to one thing- active discrimination against working parents, particularly those that are female and dare to take mat leave. There is no flexible working, and short term funding via grants means you are penalised for taking mat leave and often left in a legal grey area (from personal experience). The message is sent to you that as a working mother, you are no longer focused on the job and cannot work the required unpaid overtime for the job. I have had friends be to this explicitly by their bosses. You are left out of trips to the pub with that all important new collaborator. I could go on (at length!). I have seen this happen again and again to my female friends, most of whom have left academic STEM after having kids. These are experienced researchers and such a waste of talent. Makes me livid. I have jumped ship to a traditionally more female friendly career (clinical research) and the difference is astounding. Women in senior posts! Who knew that was possible

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the problem in biosciences isn’t wording or recruitment, it’s institutional sexism. This might have more of an impact in STEM subjects with a low uptake by women/girls but not so much in my field.

Surely by the time it comes to applying for apprenticeships the damage is largely done?

I work in a STEM field, we’re fairly balanced in my company where men and women are concerned, including management.

However I think this is largely due to the fact that the company is known for allowing flexible working, job shares and working from home. So it is more likely to attract women in the field as largely it is still women who are relied on for childcare etc.

I didn’t really understand physics at school 20years ago. There were few resources to get into programming. I’m now trying to get into software dev/IT as DH is in it and work-life is fantastic (better than my other stem job).

Much better resources now.

Nonny, we have many contractors from the Indian subcontinent. A much higher percentage of those are female than in tech roles from the local population.

I work in IT but in a non-technical role. My company has an active diversity policy but it still must be 80% male in the tech area. I have a dd and actively encourage her these areas, especially seeing the salaries of specialist contractors.

STEM is such a broad and diverse catchall term. Women are over represented in areas like psychology, medicine, biological sciences while very under represented in areas like physics, engineering.

So women are getting into STEM but usually in roles that are more people oriented, while men tend to be drawn towards subjects that are oriented around things.

The difference in interest for people vs things could be completely down to socialization or a mix of biological as well socialization. It can be hard to untangle since humans absorb a lot around them from an early age.

Also there will be other factors like flexible working around children, sexist attitudes from colleagues or management etc that can influence the sort of career trajectories taken by women.

Poorer or less developed countries have higher rates of women in STEM because IMO it seems like a more pragmatic decision. There's not much social security so both men and women think of degrees that can lead to stable, well paying careers, especially if it has potential to emigrate to a better life elsewhere. And STEM subjects tick the box compared to say, a history or art degree. So it's no surprise more women go for those kinds of jobs. They want to provide for their families.
That's what I did anyway. My decision to get into computer science was because I knew the jobs potentially paid well. It used to surprise me that people in the West went for degrees based on how much they liked the subject lol.

And as you go higher up the chain, management, consultancy, it's still predominantly male. The footwork is more equal.

It never ceases to amaze me how many men there are in senior nursing roles given what a small proportion of the workforce they make up.

Where did you get the idea that girls think that women can’t be doctors?

Because primary aged girls I have worked with have rarely said they want to be a doctor but have often said they want to be a nurse. Girls have told me that girls are nurses, men are doctors. Hopefully it changes in secondary school.

Most children think of engineers as people who fix their cars or people who come to the house to fix/service things like boilers. These people are nearly always men so they draw men.

"Honest" and "dependable" seem a bit redundant- aren't they pretty much essential for any job?

From my experience of sales - I'd say not....

On that, I remember having some training in hiring/interviewing/reviewing, and talking to my then boss about it afterwards - we were given these forms, with scores and words to describe interviewees, and they were standard for any role. So there'd be things like 'creative' or 'self-starter' - and we talked about it and decided that these things were a tad ridiculous, because (for example) - if you're hiring a bookkeeper, you don't want someone who's 'creative', we were hiring programmers, and we didn't want self-starters who'd go off on flights of fancy rather than maintaining the code in a reliable, standard way.

So words matter. I'm senior now, but I wouldn't have applied for a job with 'kind' or 'ambitious' in the descriptions, because those, to me, are both code words for wanting me do much more work than you want to pay me for.. but perhaps I'm jaded.

Where did you get the idea that girls think that women can’t be doctors? Engineer picture drawing, I can get that as no one is really sure what an engineer looks like.

All I can say is we need to tell our daughters that women can be anything. If we find concrete examples, that’s great, but I’m not sure its necessary.

Explain to them that it will not be an easy task at times, but very little that is worthwhile is.

I sometimes wonder if the reason medicine is becoming more female is all the negative publicity about the NHS and doctors’ work-life balance. It makes me wonder if its gradually being seen as ‘shitwork’ and a less desirable career, so the shift is about males opting out at medical school application stage. For women, the ‘shitwork’ aspect is balanced by the NHS’ flexibility as an employer and the scope to work part-time.

By all of this, I don’t mean to disparage the profession or the work doctors do at all, just that the work is now seen as harder and less desirable.

yes I suppose medicine is STEM

Of course it is STEM.Or are you now going to posit that it's the wrong sort of STEM? I've seen that argument run on here.

Edinburgh entry for medicine and veterinary medicine is , for Scottish Highers, A passes in Chemistry and two of Biology, Mathematics or Physics.

The advert that increased female applications by 40 per cent referred to by Morfee, and seen by FE Week, lists a number of “feminine and neutral” words that should be used in job adverts, which include: understand, kind, honest, dependable, co-operative and support

It also lists “masculine” words that should be avoided, such as: active, decisive, leader, ambition, challenge, objective, competitiveness, independence, opinion, confident and intellectual

I don't think "kind" should feature in any job advert unless there is a very, very specific job requirement for enhanced empathy. That would put me off applying; as would "understand" unless qualified in some way.

"Honest" and "dependable" seem a bit redundant- aren't they pretty much essential for any job?

As for the supposedly masculine words - apart from opinion they seem pretty standard for job specs in my profession, which currently, like medicine has around 60 % female entry.

Veterinary medicine has, I believe over 80% female undergraduates.

Medicine requires attributes off both lists as it combines science with a need for people skills.

I agree on women applicants more likely to get through blind, but that's not a bad thing.