To be a bit cynical about the girls in STEM push?

[StormBringers]

It feels a bit like the ‘you can have it all!’ That my mum heard, wow you can do work! When the reality meant burnout for many women, still doing the housework and kids in most families/ culturally being expected to on top of ft work. Girls with good grades are being directed to STEM, riding on the guilt of all those tragedies of women who gave up on maths and science despite their capabilities.

I see lots of girls excelling in STEM, but I’m not hearing about the family friendly work environment that awaits them. It still seems to be a male advantage in the work place (well unless you make the perfectly valid choice to focus on career instead of children). Surely if we want women in STEM it’s not about targeting kS2 with clubs, it’s about changing the work place and legislating and supporting women to work and excel in STEM in a way that allows them realistic chances to also chose children?

It feels like we’re currently evangelising STEM to girls, telling them they can do anything and pouring them into a broken receptacle they’ll probably leave. Do we have too few women because they don’t follow the academic paths? Or because the workplace presents barriers. I’m dwelling from watching my eldest flounder post Maths phd ... something that I’ve never seen her do before.

Also, we seem to be forgetting debate, creativity etc in schools and the place for philosophy.

Aibu to be getting sick of it lately?

Maybe when there are more women in influential positions, the workplace can solve the impenetrable problems of childcare, work/home life balance, and taking up to a year off to have a child.

Not sure about the other areas of STEM but I work in the Technology sector and it is pretty family friendly - working from home and flexi time. Enhanced maternity pay. Decent holiday allowance. We have a big push on recruiting more women and are doing a lot of presentations to local schools.

I guess a summary, I feel bright girls are being too strongly pushed to go for STEM lately. Like it’s the feminist correct thing to do. Girls wouldn’t be pushed to do anything due to gender, and I’m not sure if promoting stem is going too far at time (disclaimer, I dropped sciences/ maths with all As because I wanted to, and felt even then the disappointment of following a more feminine route. It was totally my choice.)

I hope that you are wrong, and that those behind the push to get women into STEM careers have thought about the necessity for family friendly policies - sadly history would seem to suggest that you are more likely to be right.

YABU to target this at the STEM push. It is an issue for women in all areas of work.

YANBU to think that the gender pay gap and the gendered nature of socially reproductive work act as a double whammy to create massive problems for working women. The reason this isn't sorted out is because families tend to make decisions about their finances as a unit, and the gender pay gap (which starts straight out of university, and is connected with a systemic underrating of female achievement) means that it often makes practical sense for the woman to give up her job to do childcare and socially reproductive work, which reinforces the whole cycle.

Free childcare would be a policy that would go a long way to rebalancing this. I don't have kids, and I massively support it as a lynchpin of feminist politics.

It needs to get to a critical mass to change things, women are underrepresented because the jobs aren't family friendly but only by women getting to the top will things change. Dd is heading (hopefully) onto a course which is 90% male but there's a female only scholarship she's applied for that pays half her fees!

Another post that could have come from 1989 ... along with the recent discussions about changing working hours to help with schools and traffic.

The Tech sector has to offer working from home and flexi time in order to actually recruit staff. We wouldn’t be able to recruit anyone (male or female) if we didn’t as most decent tech companies offer those things.

Most of the engineering consultancies that I’ve worked in have family friendly policies and do all they can to encourage women to join them and progress their careers.

Clearly nothing has changed in the last thirty years, that's really depressing

The trouble is that work policies only solve things in the workplace. They don't solve the fact that women still do a vastly disproportionate amount of housework and childcare even where both partners are working equal hours. Workplaces need to offer a solution that gets into the problems of the private sphere.

Luckily, these girls are growing up in families where the woman isn't taking on the bulk of the housework and admin.

Mine aren't anyway. So they won't grow up thinking it's their job to wash the dishes and pay the bills and organise the childcare.

I advise parents to ensure their kids of both sexes are similarly educated.

I used to work in tech, it offered great opportunities for freelance work which meant it could be very family friendly. I don't know about maths and sciences though, they might be different.

This is probably two separate issues, but if women are as likely to be in decent careers, they are less likely to be the one that takes a step back when having children and make it less of the norm of 'man in full time, high paying work, woman in low paid part time work'.

If both partners are equally at work, then they should also take equal responsibility for housework and childcare, with it being just as affordable for the family for the man to be the one who takes a step back, or goes part time, or both might be able to do 4 days a week to share childcare etc. Or have more money available for cleaning and childcare help.

Also agree that STEM sector can be more family friendly in terms of fixed hours, no excessive overtime required, flexible working, working at home, but that's something that should be encouraged in all industries for men and women whether they are parents or not - lets get away from the long hours, always on, work to live culture so men are less able to hide from domestic responsibilities, because they are at work and women feel they can't compete because they can't or don't want to spend their lives in the office.

There is no reason why women can’t do Tech jobs. It wasn’t the case 50 years ago. Something has changed culturally and it just isn’t popular with girls. They’re put off it because it sounds hard (so is maths but that’s compulsory at GCSE) and they don’t want to be the only girl in class.

I think YABU.
The reason there aren't more women in STEM is much more due to girls not choosing to follow those subjects to degree level, rather than due to them not being able to find jobs / family friendly policies.

My degree was ~15% female.

I worked in electronics / tech / IT for 20 years and again this was very male dominated but actually we had great family friendly policies, flexible working etc.

Maybe I’m just a bit unsurprised at my eldest. She’s excelled at the top of a male degree and masters, funded PhD- excelled. Got the graduate scheme... and admitted she wants to actually start a family and feels she needs to chose (married during her first degree). I understand her if I’m honest, despite the push to be her best. Realistically if she does carry on and have the baby too it’ll be bloody tough, frowned upon and she doesn’t feel like it. She’s swapping to a more sedate option of working elsewhere in a less skilled (but relevant) role. I too was desperate to have children, and I did, and I didn’t regret it. It’s hard t describe why she is, it’s more insidious and culture based blocks. The loss of research, the taking over of her work by others not to return to, the frowning upon her and dismissal of her if she makes choices. The need to prove herself going over and above burning the candle at both ends/ returning etc. It’s hard to put your finger in, but realistically you need to be tough to weather it- and although we need trail blazers I out no blame on her not feeling tough enough

Henny - bloody good for you! I'm serious, that's excellent. But it's not common. I have worked at three different universities, which you would think would be relatively enlightened in terms of gender relations, and I reckon less than 5% of the staff are in similarly equal partnerships. Overwhelmingly, men rise to the top because they have women who are taking on more than their fair share of the socially reproductive work. And yet they chose to have kids.

My last comments are what we are being told by the schools we work with.

Sadly, it seems as though things have gone backwards since I was at school in the 90s.

I’m a STEM student with children. University have been incredibly supportive (thankyou Athena Swan).

They’re put off it because it sounds hard (so is maths but that’s compulsory at GCSE) and they don’t want to be the only girl in class

If the schools you work with are telling you this they need to take a look at the way they are both teaching and portraying tech subjects. Those girls are getting those perceptions from somewhere.

"If both partners are equally at work, then they should also take equal responsibility for housework and childcare"

Statistics suggest that this simply doesn't happen. Where women work an equal or greater number of hours than men, they still end up doing more housework.

On top of that, all too often, women end up choosing to do fewer hours because they are paid less than men due to sexist gender pay gaps. Many end up carrying an enormous burden of housework and chores that are inherently shit and grinding work.

We have a HUGE problem in the home.

www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/feb/17/dirty-secret-why-housework-gender-gap

It feels a bit like the ‘you can have it all!’ That my mum heard, wow you can do work! When the reality meant burnout for many women, still doing the housework and kids in most families/ culturally being expected to on top of ft work

You must be unlucky or selective in the women you have been around. The vast majority of my friends are educated to the level of multiple postgraduate degrees, and work at a high level across academia, creative industries, civil service, law, and I can assure you that, having put a lot of time and effort into our careers, none of us has wasted our time on men who don't pull their weight domestically. And certainly no one is falling for that Mn old chestnut of 'Oh, as I'm the lower earner, it makes sense for the family if I give up work', because we're not the lower earners, and have never considered our careers secondary.

To give an example - when I was at school, design and technology were classed as boys' subjects in most schools, mine made a point of teaching them as subjects everyone did/could do. Classes were 50/50 even after options.

I work in an engineering company and although it's not perfect, it's a lot more family friendly than the finance firm I used to work for.

In my experience Law and Finance are some of the worst for a long hours culture and very family unfriendly. But women do enter these sectors in greater numbers than engineering