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?

Forgot to mention: I work in IT. The ratio in my dept is 5:1 male: female

It’s actually the most family friendly dept to work in: working flexible hours / compressed hours/ at home and taking time off for dependants is not a problem

@Mammylamb I think that’s where we hid a problem, we were equal earners doing long hours. If DH has earned less or worked less hours it would be natural for him to do more, I think though in any family it’s massively hard to have both parents doing ft long hours. That’s what I see among my friends and my generation, men generally are willing. Families are hitting burnout for a different reason. Struggling to match two adults with long hours, added to the mix of very expensive childcare and mortgages. Many I know are doing a drop off each in the morning to find the most affordable childcare and frequently juggling evenings

Dd has now switched to a role in IT for the family friendly bits, Tbf it is certainly an easier area of STEM she’s found with a future of possible home working and part time projects. All STEM are not equal though...

I just don’t think the female half of the population has, collectively, as great an appetite and enthusiasm for STEM subjects and careers

That doesn’t happen in a vacuum though. The gendered messages we send to children start when they are tiny and range from extremely subtle to massive.

This bbc experiment from a few years ago illustrates it

A baby is offered different toys, depending on what sex the adults think the child is

Boys toys tend to be harder, more about spatial awareness and motor skills, girls are softer, more about social interaction.

So it starts there...

Dentistry is a science based career that’s fairly family friendly. I had a year off for maternity (6 months paid) and now work 3 days a week, although I did 2 when he was a baby. I used to earn more than DH when FT so do ok PT.
Lots of women on the course too- my year was 60% female and it seems to be about 50/50 now (I work at a Dental school 1 day).
My DH does just as much home and childcare as I do, including thinking- “wifework”. I’m hoping that bringing DS up in a house where this is the norm will mean he grows up with the right idea.

Thereverenddoctor
Not all female people want to have families.

Indeed, but to sell all STEM careers as family friendly or having the ability to become family friendly would be selling a lie.

My tech sector job not only includes the aforementioned flexible hours, working from home, it offers 4 months fully paid paternity leave to match the maternity leave offered. This is in the US. That's about as family friendly as it gets. If you have the skills that are in high demand you will obviously get offered better working conditions.

To add. As a child, I hated maths. Thanks to a tutor I got an A at GCSE but I really hated it. Looking back, it’s because I was afraid of it. Might sound silly but truth is with maths you can be right or wrong (and I was afraid of being wrong and hence seen as stupid). With the arts, English etc - you’re never wrong. I remember at university writing an essay for my journalism course and the feedback I had was... “I disagree with everything you said, but I’ve had to give you a 2:1 because you argued all your points so eloquently”. Perhaps if we looked at how male/ female brains are wired and admit that we are different and that’s not a bad thing, then perhaps we begin to understand why boys like some things and girls like other things. That’s not to say that there are jobs for the boys and jobs for the girls but to simply accept there will always be some things that attract women more than men and vice versa. Perhaps girls are afraid of being wrong....so like me choose subjects where there is no right answer. Or perhaps it’s the boys who need to to pursue subjects that allow them to prove they’re right. Who knows. It’s a mystery but it’s what makes the word go round. I like that we are different personally.

Perhaps if we looked at how male/ female brains are wired and admit that we are different and that’s not a bad thing

It’s very, very difficult to show this - there’s no evidence for it - because our brains are so plastic and the gendered nonsense starts from when babies are so small. Our brains get better at the things we practice most.

Our brains get better at the things we practice most

Yes, this^ The much cited study of London cabbies is a great example.

I don't think that's exclusive to STEM Boney, and I'd also say that what works as family friendly during one part of family life might not in another - FT childcare for pre-schoolers is expensive but lines up well with office hours, primary school hours don't (and keep wanting you to go to things in office hours) and by secondary school pick ups are less of an issue but things like sports practices and matches might be more of a thing. So a shift pattern that might be a nightmare for a parent of 8 & 10 yr olds might fit fine with 11& 13 yr olds

perhaps girls are afraid of being wrong

And why might that be? Could it be because girls are brought up to be people pleasers?

So much (all?) of the differences between girls and boys cognitativly starts from how we treat boys and girls differently. But because it starts from birth, it can be hard to believe it’s not innate.

You have the premise slightly arse about face though OP.

Im in the Engineering side oF STEM. And do a lot of outreach stuff in schools. We aren’t looking to encourage more women into engineering jus because it’s trendy and right-on. It’s because we are fucking desperate for engineers in the UK.

If only 10%of women are engineers, targeting girls in schools is a quick and easy win to get more people overall. There is nothing about engineering that makes boys better at it. In many countries there is close to a 50/50 male female split.

Also, once you get on the job the whole process suffers if everyone’s the same. We need loads of different viewpoints to get the best outcomes (the example I often use that all women get is that , a mixed team of male and female architects wouldn’t forget to leave space for sanitary bins in toilet cubicles, but all male teams will)

You are making your assumptions on the false premise that these women working in stem will be doing the housework/childcare. They can work in stem while their husbands stay at home or take on more flexible work.

Why are people using "family" friendly to mean "female friendly"? Not all women have children AND men do also have children. The only problem I can see is that most men don't see "the family" as their responsibility. And yes, I can say "most men." I'm 40, I know a ton of people, in my experience women pick up the slack relentlessly.

So YABU. I want girls to feel able to pursue whatever career they want WITHOUT thinking they might have to choose between career and family.
Why should they? Men don't.

What you’re describing is a work-life balance issue, parental leave issue, family dynamic issue. It is not a STEM issue. I am a physicist, when I did my undergraduate degree in 1995 the female:male was 1:8. My subject and profession are stereotypically male. Girls are put off studying physics because of the way it is taught, and the way girls are raised to believe it is a boys subject. The push for STEM options for girls at school is extremely important (it’s not working particularly well in my subject, but they’re trying).
You’re clearly thinking of your daughters situation and are upset for her, but her predicament is not because she studied maths.

Also, looking in from the outside, a lot of so called traditional female careers are actually not family friendly at all. Because women were traditionally expected to quit their job when they married.

Off the top of my head...
Nurse- shift work not easy to get childcare
Teacher- loads of out of hours (unpaid) work and never seeing your own child in sports day or nativity play
Hair and Beauty- Long Hours, not well paid

My STEM job pays better than teaching, i work true flexitime and don’t have to do anything unpaid out of hours. Plus it is really challenging and rewarding.

A significant proportion have decided against children, and really that probably feels like the most sensible decision if you want that type of career.

This. I work in stem and have done for over 20 years. I started out in research - working in a lab, doing cell culture work as well as other stuff relating to exercise physiology. The nature of the work is that you're dependent sometimes on biological systems doing things - like growing, replicating etc. Some experiments by their particular nature take several hours and you have to be there for different steps. It's just the nature of the work. It is nit family friendly, it is not friendly to any form of personal life. It is long hours and hard work.

If people - young men as well as young women - want to work in that area then they are not going to fundamentally change the nature of the work so they will have to adapt to it in other ways. Several of the people that I was working in the lab with decided not to have children and to concentrate on their careers. It is a perfectly valid choice - feminism is not just about reproduction and childcare, it is about equality, though sometimes that seems to be forgotten on MN.

I decided it wasn't for me. I never saw my boyfriend, I knew I wanted children and I didn't want the thrill of research enough to make the sacrifice.

You are making your assumptions on the false premise that these women working in stem will be doing the housework/childcare. They can work in stem while their husbands stay at home or take on more flexible work.
I suspect that a lot of women like the lower paid less family friendly job as an excuse to be the one to stay at home and wouldn't be too thrilled to have that reversed.

Basically you are probably your dds main influence.
Take from that what you will.

My mother never gave up work and my dad did a huge amount of caring. I would never give up my career. Because neither of my parents did. So it’s just natural for me to think it’s not normal to give up on a career.

Whereas your dd has seen the opposite.

I also have friends who both parents do 4 days each with a day with their children.
Totally equal - it’s amazing for the children to learn to have really individual

relationships with their parents and see that everyone can be equal.

I'm yet another with a long career in STEM (>30 years), mostly working from home and part time ever since DD started school. She's at uni now but the work-life balance suits me. Decent pay and benefits for a not very stressful job. Very creative too... somewhere in this thread there's been the ridiculous implication that STEM careers aren't creative!

A significant proportion have decided against children, and really that probably feels like the most sensible decision if you want that type of career

Or maybe they don't have children simply because they don't want them? People who want children tend to have them if they can, and then make everything else work the best they can.

I'll try to give a systematic answer. STEM is not one thing, it's a whole sector of industry with thousands of roles. Some are not very family friendly but by no means all. I have brought up two children with flexible working as have many colleagues.

The system needs adjusting at every level. There is a big skills shortage but as a percentage of all students its maybe a 5-10% shift needed from arts to science. That's 2 or 3 in every class, the ones who have the ability but do not see the opportunity due to lack of knowledge or gender conforming pressure. That leaves plenty to do all the other stuff. It doesn't really matter if the majority of women aren't interested in working in STEM, the minority who do just needs to be a bit bigger.

Then there is still work to do in the industry on unconscious bias, promotions etc but that will come I believe.